Implementation of the USB Token System for Fingerprint Verification

Abstract

In the modern electronic world, the authentication of a person is an important task in many areas of day-to-day. Using biometrics to authenticate a person's identity has several advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and passwords. To gain maximum security in the verification system using biometrics, the computation of the verification as well as the store of the biometric pattern has to take place in the security token(e.g., smart card, USB token). However, there is an open issue of integrating biometrics into the security token because of its limited resources(processing power and memory space). In this paper, we describe our implementation of the USB token system having 206MHz StrongARM CPU, 16MBytes Flash memory, and 1MBytes RAM. Also, we describe a fingerprint verification algorithm that can be executed in the restricted environments. To meet the memory space specification and processing power of the security token, in fingerprint verification algorithm, we develop a data structure, called a multi-resolution accumulator array. Based on experimental results, we confirmed that the RAM requirement of the proposed algorithm is about 16 KBytes, and the Equal Error Rate(EER) is 1.7%. Therefore, our fingerprint verification algorithm can be executed in real-time on the developed USB token without degrading accuracy.

Fingerprint Template Protection Using Fuzzy Vault

“…Only C(36,13) ≈ 2.3×10 9 of these combinations will reveal the secret(i.e., unlock the vault). Thus, it will need an average of 3.4×10 11 (=C(230,9)/C(30,9)) evaluations for an attacker to crack the vault.…”

“…A fingerprint authentication system has two phases: enrollment and verification [11]. In the off-line enrollment phase, an enrolled fingerprint image is preprocessed, and features, called as minutiae, are extracted and stored.…”