Integrating Biometric Cryptosystem with steganography for authentication

The security of digital information over the internet has gained prominence over the years due to the flourishing e-commerce. The traditional ways of personal identification like knowledge-based methods (i.e. passwords, ID cards) and token based methods no longer suffice the need of secure transmission of critical data online. To overcome this shortcoming, Biometrics can be used instead of passwords or pins. Although, Biometric Authentication adds up to the online security aspect but it can be vulnerable to various attacks over the open networks. Hence, Biometric Cryptosystems are proposed to improve the security of biometric authentication systems and to create revocable representations of individuals. On the other hand, Steganography techniques play a vital role in hiding encrypted biometric data behind random carrier. The proposed system is worked on a readymade database of ten fingerprint samples and focusses on providing enhanced security to the biometric fingerprint data in two levels (i.e. Biometric Cryptosystem followed by Steganography) before it is transmitted online to the Authenticator. At the Authenticator side, the identification process is carried out using Hamming distance or Euclidean distance. Furthermore, this system gives an effective TAR of almost 99% with time complexity of RC4 key generation algorithm as low as 18 msec.