With fast evolution of mobile devices and mobile network, the need of protecting user sensitive information locally and performing secure user authentication remotely become evermore increasing. Bio-cryptography is emerging as a powerful solution which can combine the advantages of conventional cryptography and biometric security. In this paper, we present an efficient bio-cryptographic security protocol designed for client/server authentication in current mobile computing environment, with a reasonable assumption that server is secure. In this protocol, fingerprint biometric is used in user verification, protected by a computationally efficient Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The genuine fingerprint information is hidden in the feature vault which is the mixture of genuine and chaff features. Fingerprint features are not only used for biometric verification but also for cryptographic key generation. Our security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can provide a secure and trustworthy authentication of remote mobile users over insecure network. Experimental results on public domain database show an acceptable verification performance. We also tested the computational costs and efficiency of our protocol on the CLDC emulator using Java ME (previous J2ME) programming technology. The simulation results prove that the proposed protocol suits current mobile environment.

Abstract-Biometric authentication is emerging as the promising solution to conventional cryptography based authentication technologies. However, protecting users' biometric templates stored in a mobile device in a secure way is a challenge issue and has attracted many attentions. As one of the possible solutions, the Fuzzy Vault construct binds a secret key and biometric information to provide template protection. Most existing Fingerprint Fuzzy Vault algorithms use pre-aligned fingerprint impressions and rely strongly on image registration, a process that is well known to be nontrivial and unreliable. Moreover, it is inherently insecure to store raw fingerprint images for the alignment. In this paper, we propose a Fingerprint Fuzzy Vault based on composite features which are reliable, distortion tolerant and registration-free. Experimental results on public database show that our scheme can improve verification performance significantly.

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