A Novel Biometric Identification Scheme Based on Zero-Knowledge Succinct Noninteractive Argument of Knowledge

Abstract

Biometric identification is a convenient and reliable method in identity authentication. The widespread adoption of biometric identification requires strong privacy protection against possible theft or loss of biometric data. Existing techniques for privacy-preserving biometric identification mainly rely on traditional cryptographic technology such as oblivious transfer and homomorphic encryption, which will incur huge expenses to the system and cannot be applied to large-scale practical applications. For these issues, we propose a biometric identification scheme by constructing zero-knowledge succinct noninteractive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK). Our scheme not only reduces the communication overhead, which only needs to send 8 constants to the verifier but also can protect the fingerprint template from disclosure. The time complexity of proof generation and proof verification are about O(C) and O x + log C , respectively, and the size of the proof is only 8 constants, where C and x represent the size of the circuit and the public input, respectively. We have implemented the proposed authentication solution on a public data set of fingerprint images and evaluated the performance and security.

Systematic Review: Comparing zk-SNARK, zk-STARK, and Bulletproof Protocols for Privacy-Preserving Authentication

“…Furthermore, the largest proving key size from [63] is nearly 60000 times larger than the smallest proving key size from [45]. Finally, the longest proof verification time from [64] is about 134 times larger than the shortest time from [48], while the smallest proof size from [47] is about 6 times smaller than the largest proof size from [66]. In short, the verification key sizes, proof sizes, and even the verification times show a reasonable deviation in our opinion, while the other values have a variance that is much higher than we would expect.…”

“…• In [48] the authors proposed a biometric identification scheme based on zk-SNARKs that prevented biometric template information leakage. The proposed scheme was a solution to schemes that stored biometrics templates directly, which were insecure and schemes that applied feature transformations or biometric encryption, which showed reduced identification accuracy.…”

“…Similarly, [28] only performed an analysis on the response times of the M1, 16GB RAM [40] unspecified "common computer" [41] Xeon Silver 4210, 16GB RAM [42] i7-9750H, 8GB RAM Other [75] i7-6700k (single thread), ? RAM [76] i7-8700, 16GB RAM [77] i5-1135G7, 8GB RAM General [44] i7-8750H, 16GB RAM [45] i7-3632QM, 16GB RAM [47] i7-4790, 16GB RAM [48] unspecified i5, 8GB RAM [63] i5-4210M, 4GB RAM [64] AWS 16vCPU, 64GB RAM [66] AWS c5.2large 8vCPU, 16GB RAM system and did not provide performance numbers for the zero-knowledge proofs which we could compare here. This means that in total we had four performance analyses to compare, three using the zk-SNARK protocol and one using the Bulletproof protocol.…”

“…A group provided an overview of the system's security. Only the work of Guo et al [48] is included here, wherein they used mathematics to characterize the soundness and completeness of the zk-SNARK and demonstrate the security of their suggested fix. An additional group computed the likelihood of the suggested solution's security failing.…”

“…This exploration has the potential to ameliorate the performance of NIZKPs, rendering the trade-off more acceptable and thereby increasing the attractiveness of choosing NIZKPs for the enhanced privacy they provide. Noteworthy works advocating for this future research direction include [18], [25], [29], [44], [48], [63], and [64].…”