THRIVE: Threshold Homomorphic encryption based secure and privacy preserving bIometric VErification system

In this paper, we propose a new biometric verification and template protection system which we call the THRIVE system. The system includes novel enrollment and authentication protocols based on threshold homomorphic cryptosystem where the private key is shared between a user and the verifier. In the THRIVE system, only encrypted binary biometric templates are stored in the database and verification is performed via homomorphically randomized templates, thus, original templates are never revealed during the authentication stage. The THRIVE system is designed for the malicious model where the cheating party may arbitrarily deviate from the protocol specification. Since threshold homomorphic encryption scheme is used, a malicious database owner cannot perform decryption on encrypted templates of the users in the database. Therefore, security of the THRIVE system is enhanced using a two-factor authentication scheme involving the user's private key and the biometric data. We prove security and privacy preservation capability of the proposed system in the simulation-based model with no assumption. The proposed system is suitable for applications where the user does not want to reveal her biometrics to the verifier in plain form but she needs to proof her physical presence by using biometrics. The system can be used with any biometric modality and biometric feature extraction scheme whose output templates can be binarized. The overall connection time for the proposed THRIVE system is estimated to be 336 ms on average for 256-bit biohash vectors on a desktop PC running with quad-core 3.2 GHz CPUs at 10 Mbit/s up/down link connection speed. Consequently, the proposed system can be efficiently used in real life applications

Modified shielding function for multi-biometric authentication and template protection / Abayomi Jegede... [et al.]

Biometrics provides a secure means of authentication because it is difficult to copy, forge, or steal biometric modalities. However, unprotected biometric data can be used to violate the security of the authentication system and the privacy of legitimate users. This paper proposes and implements a modified shielding function which provides multi-biometric authentication, template security and user privacy simultaneously. Experimental results based on face and iris datasets obtained from CASIA Near Infra-Red face database and CASIA Iris database version 2 respectively show that the approach has good recognition accuracy (false rejection rate of 0.65% and false acceptance rate of 0.035%). Security analysis shows that the method provides better security (key length of 120 bits) and user privacy compared to previous approaches based on the generic shielding function

State of the Art in Biometric Key Binding and Key Generation Schemes

Direct storage of biometric templates in databases exposes the authentication system and legitimate users to numerous security and privacy challenges. Biometric cryptosystems or template protection schemes are used to overcome the security and privacy challenges associated with the use of biometrics as a means of authentication. This paper presents a review of previous works in biometric key binding and key generation schemes. The review focuses on key binding techniques such as biometric encryption, fuzzy commitment scheme, fuzzy vault and shielding function. Two categories of key generation schemes considered are private template and quantization schemes. The paper also discusses the modes of operations, strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of key-based template protection schemes. The goal is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current and emerging trends in key-based biometric cryptosystems

A fingerprint based crypto-biometric system for secure communication

To ensure the secure transmission of data, cryptography is treated as the most effective solution. Cryptographic key is an important entity in this procedure. In general, randomly generated cryptographic key (of 256 bits) is difficult to remember. However, such a key needs to be stored in a protected place or transported through a shared communication line which, in fact, poses another threat to security. As an alternative, researchers advocate the generation of cryptographic key using the biometric traits of both sender and receiver during the sessions of communication, thus avoiding key storing and at the same time without compromising the strength in security. Nevertheless, the biometric-based cryptographic key generation possesses few concerns such as privacy of biometrics, sharing of biometric data between both communicating users (i.e., sender and receiver), and generating revocable key from irrevocable biometric. This work addresses the above-mentioned concerns. In this work, a framework for secure communication between two users using fingerprint based crypto-biometric system has been proposed. For this, Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm is used to generate public keys from private keys of both sender and receiver which are shared and further used to produce a symmetric cryptographic key at both ends. In this approach, revocable key for symmetric cryptography is generated from irrevocable fingerprint. The biometric data is neither stored nor shared which ensures the security of biometric data, and perfect forward secrecy is achieved using session keys. This work also ensures the long-term security of messages communicated between two users. Based on the experimental evaluation over four datasets of FVC2002 and NIST special database, the proposed framework is privacy-preserving and could be utilized onto real access control systems.Comment: 29 single column pages, 8 figure

Protection of privacy in biometric data

Biometrics is commonly used in many automated veri cation systems offering several advantages over traditional veri cation methods. Since biometric features are associated with individuals, their leakage will violate individuals\u27 privacy, which can cause serious and continued problems as the biometric data from a person are irreplaceable. To protect the biometric data containing privacy information, a number of privacy-preserving biometric schemes (PPBSs) have been developed over the last decade, but they have various drawbacks. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing PPBSs and give guidance for future privacy-preserving biometric research. In particular, we explain the functional mechanisms of popular PPBSs and present the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving biometric methods based on these mechanisms. Furthermore, we discuss the drawbacks of the existing PPBSs and point out the challenges and future research directions in PPBSs

Securing Cloud Storage by Transparent Biometric Cryptography

With the capability of storing huge volumes of data over the Internet, cloud storage has become a popular and desirable service for individuals and enterprises. The security issues, nevertheless, have been the intense debate within the cloud community. Significant attacks can be taken place, the most common being guessing the (poor) passwords. Given weaknesses with verification credentials, malicious attacks have happened across a variety of well-known storage services (i.e. Dropbox and Google Drive) – resulting in loss the privacy and confidentiality of files. Whilst today's use of third-party cryptographic applications can independently encrypt data, it arguably places a significant burden upon the user in terms of manually ciphering/deciphering each file and administering numerous keys in addition to the login password. The field of biometric cryptography applies biometric modalities within cryptography to produce robust bio-crypto keys without having to remember them. There are, nonetheless, still specific flaws associated with the security of the established bio-crypto key and its usability. Users currently should present their biometric modalities intrusively each time a file needs to be encrypted/decrypted – thus leading to cumbersomeness and inconvenience while throughout usage. Transparent biometrics seeks to eliminate the explicit interaction for verification and thereby remove the user inconvenience. However, the application of transparent biometric within bio-cryptography can increase the variability of the biometric sample leading to further challenges on reproducing the bio-crypto key. An innovative bio-cryptographic approach is developed to non-intrusively encrypt/decrypt data by a bio-crypto key established from transparent biometrics on the fly without storing it somewhere using a backpropagation neural network. This approach seeks to handle the shortcomings of the password login, and concurrently removes the usability issues of the third-party cryptographic applications – thus enabling a more secure and usable user-oriented level of encryption to reinforce the security controls within cloud-based storage. The challenge represents the ability of the innovative bio-cryptographic approach to generate a reproducible bio-crypto key by selective transparent biometric modalities including fingerprint, face and keystrokes which are inherently noisier than their traditional counterparts. Accordingly, sets of experiments using functional and practical datasets reflecting a transparent and unconstrained sample collection are conducted to determine the reliability of creating a non-intrusive and repeatable bio-crypto key of a 256-bit length. With numerous samples being acquired in a non-intrusive fashion, the system would be spontaneously able to capture 6 samples within minute window of time. There is a possibility then to trade-off the false rejection against the false acceptance to tackle the high error, as long as the correct key can be generated via at least one successful sample. As such, the experiments demonstrate that a correct key can be generated to the genuine user once a minute and the average FAR was 0.9%, 0.06%, and 0.06% for fingerprint, face, and keystrokes respectively. For further reinforcing the effectiveness of the key generation approach, other sets of experiments are also implemented to determine what impact the multibiometric approach would have upon the performance at the feature phase versus the matching phase. Holistically, the multibiometric key generation approach demonstrates the superiority in generating the bio-crypto key of a 256-bit in comparison with the single biometric approach. In particular, the feature-level fusion outperforms the matching-level fusion at producing the valid correct key with limited illegitimacy attempts in compromising it – 0.02% FAR rate overall. Accordingly, the thesis proposes an innovative bio-cryptosystem architecture by which cloud-independent encryption is provided to protect the users' personal data in a more reliable and usable fashion using non-intrusive multimodal biometrics.Higher Committee of Education Development in Iraq (HCED