Securing identities through fingerprint template protection

Abstract

Biometric authentication systems have been extensively used in numerous applications of different fields in order to provide secure access to different resources. These systems recognize an individual by means of physiological traits such as fingerprint, face, iris, ear, etc., or behavioral traits such as gait, signature, voice, etc. These traits possess unique and permanent features and are capable of distinguishing the identity of an individual from others in a biometric system. Biometric authentication systems have several advantages over the conventional authentication systems which mainly rely on passwords and tokens. In conventional authentication systems, there is an ample number of possibilities where a password or token can be stolen by an adversary. In addition, the user has to always remember the password or token or carry the card for authentication purposes. In contrast, as biometric traits are an integral part of the human body, there is no need to remember anything as well as make any special efforts to carry them along for the purpose of using them in the biometric authentication system. Among all of these biometric traits, the fingerprint is one of the extensively used bio metric traits for authentication. This is due to several advantages, such as permanence, easy to capture, uniqueness, etc., that it offers. In a fingerprint-based biometric system, informa tion of minutiae points is commonly utilized to compute the user template. The template is further stored in the database for future authentication purposes. Although fingerprint biometrics provides numerous advantages over the other biometric traits, it suffers from se curity and privacy issues of the stored user template. It has been discussed in the literature that the reconstruction of the fingerprint image is feasible by means of a compromised fin gerprint based user template that basically contains the information of the minutiae points. Consequently, this can cause a permanent identity loss to an individual as the fingerprint biometrics is unchangeable if it is compromised. Therefore, it is crucial to protect the fin gerprint based user template in such a way that even if it is compromised, it is infeasible for an adversary to reconstruct the original fingerprint image or features from it.