Privacy-Preserving Biometric Authentication

Abstract

Biometric-based authentication provides a highly accurate means of authentication without requiring the user to memorize or possess anything. However, there are three disadvantages to the use of biometrics in authentication; any compromise is permanent as it is impossible to revoke biometrics; there are significant privacy concerns with the loss of biometric data; and humans possess only a limited number of biometrics, which limits how many services can use or reuse the same form of authentication. As such, enhancing biometric template security is of significant research interest. One of the methodologies is called cancellable biometric template which applies an irreversible transformation on the features of the biometric sample and performs the matching in the transformed domain. Yet, this is itself susceptible to specific classes of attacks, including hill-climb, pre-image, and attacks via records multiplicity. This work has several outcomes and contributions to the knowledge of privacy-preserving biometric authentication. The first of these is a taxonomy structuring the current state-of-the-art and provisions for future research. The next of these is a multi-filter framework for developing a robust and secure cancellable biometric template, designed specifically for fingerprint biometrics. This framework is comprised of two modules, each of which is a separate cancellable fingerprint template that has its own matching and measures. The matching for this is based on multiple thresholds. Importantly, these methods show strong resistance to the above-mentioned attacks. Another of these outcomes is a method that achieves a stable performance and can be used to be embedded into a Zero-Knowledge-Proof protocol. In this novel method, a new strategy was proposed to improve the recognition error rates which is privacy-preserving in the untrusted environment. The results show promising performance when evaluated on current datasets