On the Security Risk of Cancelable Biometrics

Over the years, a number of biometric template protection schemes, primarily based on the notion of "cancelable biometrics" (CB) have been proposed. An ideal cancelable biometric algorithm possesses four criteria, i.e., irreversibility, revocability, unlinkability, and performance preservation. Cancelable biometrics employed an irreversible but distance preserving transform to convert the original biometric templates to the protected templates. Matching in the transformed domain can be accomplished due to the property of distance preservation. However, the distance preservation property invites security issues, which are often neglected. In this paper, we analyzed the property of distance preservation in cancelable biometrics, and subsequently, a pre-image attack is launched to break the security of cancelable biometrics under the Kerckhoffs's assumption, where the cancelable biometrics algorithm and parameters are known to the attackers. Furthermore, we proposed a framework based on mutual information to measure the information leakage incurred by the distance preserving transform, and demonstrated that information leakage is theoretically inevitable. The results examined on face, iris, and fingerprint revealed that the risks origin from the matching score computed from the distance/similarity of two cancelable templates jeopardize the security of cancelable biometrics schemes greatly. At the end, we discussed the security and accuracy trade-off and made recommendations against pre-image attacks in order to design a secure biometric system.Comment: Submit to P

Process of Fingerprint Authentication using Cancelable Biohashed Template

Template protection using cancelable biometrics prevents data loss and hacking stored templates, by providing considerable privacy and security. Hashing and salting techniques are used to build resilient systems. Salted password method is employed to protect passwords against different types of attacks namely brute-force attack, dictionary attack, rainbow table attacks. Salting claims that random data can be added to input of hash function to ensure unique output. Hashing salts are speed bumps in an attacker’s road to breach user’s data. Research proposes a contemporary two factor authenticator called Biohashing. Biohashing procedure is implemented by recapitulated inner product over a pseudo random number generator key, as well as fingerprint features that are a network of minutiae. Cancelable template authentication used in fingerprint-based sales counter accelerates payment process. Fingerhash is code produced after applying biohashing on fingerprint. Fingerhash is a binary string procured by choosing individual bit of sign depending on a preset threshold. Experiment is carried using benchmark FVC 2002 DB1 dataset. Authentication accuracy is found to be nearly 97\%. Results compared with state-of art approaches finds promising

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