Mixing Biometric Data For Generating Joint Identities and Preserving Privacy

Biometrics is the science of automatically recognizing individuals by utilizing biological traits such as fingerprints, face, iris and voice. A classical biometric system digitizes the human body and uses this digitized identity for human recognition. In this work, we introduce the concept of mixing biometrics. Mixing biometrics refers to the process of generating a new biometric image by fusing images of different fingers, different faces, or different irises. The resultant mixed image can be used directly in the feature extraction and matching stages of an existing biometric system. In this regard, we design and systematically evaluate novel methods for generating mixed images for the fingerprint, iris and face modalities. Further, we extend the concept of mixing to accommodate two distinct modalities of an individual, viz., fingerprint and iris. The utility of mixing biometrics is demonstrated in two different applications. The first application deals with the issue of generating a joint digital identity. A joint identity inherits its uniqueness from two or more individuals and can be used in scenarios such as joint bank accounts or two-man rule systems. The second application deals with the issue of biometric privacy, where the concept of mixing is used for de-identifying or obscuring biometric images and for generating cancelable biometrics. Extensive experimental analysis suggests that the concept of biometric mixing has several benefits and can be easily incorporated into existing biometric systems

Usability and Trust in Information Systems

The need for people to protect themselves and their assets is as old as humankind. People's physical safety and their possessions have always been at risk from deliberate attack or accidental damage. The advance of information technology means that many individuals, as well as corporations, have an additional range of physical (equipment) and electronic (data) assets that are at risk. Furthermore, the increased number and types of interactions in cyberspace has enabled new forms of attack on people and their possessions. Consider grooming of minors in chat-rooms, or Nigerian email cons: minors were targeted by paedophiles before the creation of chat-rooms, and Nigerian criminals sent the same letters by physical mail or fax before there was email. But the technology has decreased the cost of many types of attacks, or the degree of risk for the attackers. At the same time, cyberspace is still new to many people, which means they do not understand risks, or recognise the signs of an attack, as readily as they might in the physical world. The IT industry has developed a plethora of security mechanisms, which could be used to mitigate risks or make attacks significantly more difficult. Currently, many people are either not aware of these mechanisms, or are unable or unwilling or to use them. Security experts have taken to portraying people as "the weakest link" in their efforts to deploy effective security [e.g. Schneier, 2000]. However, recent research has revealed at least some of the problem may be that security mechanisms are hard to use, or be ineffective. The review summarises current research on the usability of security mechanisms, and discusses options for increasing their usability and effectiveness

Pseudo Identities Based on Fingerprint Characteristics

This paper presents the integrated project TURBINE which is funded under the EU 7th research framework programme. This research is a multi-disciplinary effort on privacy enhancing technology, combining innovative developments in cryptography and fingerprint recognition. The objective of this project is to provide a breakthrough in electronic authentication for various applications in the physical world and on the Internet. On the one hand it will provide secure identity verification thanks to fingerprint recognition. On the other hand it will reliably protect the biometric data through advanced cryptography technology. In concrete terms, it will provide the assurance that (i) the data used for the authentication, generated from the fingerprint, cannot be used to restore the original fingerprint sample, (ii) the individual will be able to create different "pseudo-identities" for different applications with the same fingerprint, whilst ensuring that these different identities (and hence the related personal data) cannot be linked to each other, and (iii) the individual is enabled to revoke an biometric identifier (pseudo-identity) for a given application in case it should not be used anymore

Recent Application in Biometrics

In the recent years, a number of recognition and authentication systems based on biometric measurements have been proposed. Algorithms and sensors have been developed to acquire and process many different biometric traits. Moreover, the biometric technology is being used in novel ways, with potential commercial and practical implications to our daily activities. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in biometrics. The topics covered in this book reflect well both aspects of development. They include biometric sample quality, privacy preserving and cancellable biometrics, contactless biometrics, novel and unconventional biometrics, and the technical challenges in implementing the technology in portable devices. The book consists of 15 chapters. It is divided into four sections, namely, biometric applications on mobile platforms, cancelable biometrics, biometric encryption, and other applications. The book was reviewed by editors Dr. Jucheng Yang and Dr. Norman Poh. We deeply appreciate the efforts of our guest editors: Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park and Dr. Sook Yoon, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers

The best of both worlds: Applying secure sketches to cancelable biometrics

AbstractCancelable biometrics and secure sketches have been introduced with the same purpose in mind: to protect the privacy of biometric templates while keeping the ability to match this protected data against a reference. The paradigm beyond cancelable biometrics is to perform an irreversible transformation over images and to make matching over transformed images. On one hand, a drawback of this technique is that for biometrics using a matching algorithm relying on some complex characteristics, such as the ones used for fingerprints, the irreversible transformation tends to break the underlying structure, thus degrading the performance accuracy. On the other hand, for secure sketches, matching is reduced to an error correction and we show here that applying secure sketch error correction to cancelable biometrics allows one to keep good matching performance. Moreover, the security’s advantages of both schemes adds up together

Towards cancelable multi-biometrics based on bloom filters: a case study on feature level fusion of face and iris

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Rathgeb, M. Gomez-Barrero, C. Busch, J. Galbally, and J. Fierrez, "Towards cancelable multi-biometrics based on bloom filters: a case study on feature level fusion of face and iris", in International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF), 2015, p. 1-6In this work we propose a generic framework for generating an irreversible representation of multiple biometric templates based on adaptive Bloom filters. The presented technique enables a feature level fusion of different biometrics (face and iris) to a single protected template, improving privacy protection compared to the corresponding systems based on a single biometric trait. At the same time, a significant gain in biometric performance is achieved, confirming the sound- ness of the proposed technique.This work has been partially supported by projects Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881) from Spanish MINECO, FIDELITY (FP7- SEC-284862) and BEAT (FP7-SEC-284989) from EU, the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) and C´atedra UAM-Telef´onica. Marta Gomez-Barrero is supported by a FPU Fellowship from Spanish MECD