Unlinkable minutiae‐based fuzzy vault for multiple fingerprints

Abstract

The fuzzy vault scheme is a cryptographic primitive being considered for storing fingerprint minutiae protected. A well-known problem of the fuzzy vault scheme is its vulnerability against correlation attack-based cross-matching thereby conflicting with the unlinkability requirement and irreversibility requirement of effective biometric information protection. Yet, it has been demonstrated that in principle a minutiae-based fuzzy vault can be secured against the correlation attack by passing the to-beprotected minutiae through a quantization scheme. Unfortunately, single fingerprints seem not to be capable of providing an acceptable security level against offline attacks. To overcome the aforementioned security issues, this paper shows how an implementation for multiple fingerprints can be derived on base of the implementation for single finger thereby making use of a Guruswami-Sudan algorithm-based decoder for verification. The implementation, of which public C++ source code can be downloaded, is evaluated for single and various multi-finger settings using the MCYT-Fingerprint-100 database and provides security enhancing features such as the possibility of combination with password and a slowdown mechanism.

Unlinkable improved multi-biometric iris fuzzy vault

“…Even minutiae-based multi-finger fuzzy vaults using four fingers do not achieve higher security levels [71]. Like in the vast majority of biometric cryptosystems, obtained decoding times may limit the system to be operated in verification mode while protected biometric templates still enable a compact storage.…”

“…From this perspective, we should increase the amount of entropy by considering implementations for fused templates extracted from more than one finger of a person [71] or, as a promising alternative, consider other biometric modalities such as a person's iris(es).…”

“…As a consequence, the use of a Lagrange-based decoder has been proposed [64] and adopted for other single-finger implementations [65,68]. A multi-finger implementation has been proposed in [71]. If a Lagrange-based decoder was chosen for the implementation, then the decoding complexity would become infeasible.…”

“…If a Lagrange-based decoder was chosen for the implementation, then the decoding complexity would become infeasible. A reasonable trade-off between decoding time and verification performance can be achieved using a Guruswami-Sudan-based decoder [71,73] of which a Reed-Solomon decoder can be viewed as a special case. In this paper, these strategies are considered for key retrieval in Section 3.4.…”

“…Moreover, we use a multiplicity of three which yields a decoder with a reasonable trade-off of error tolerance and decoding time, i.e. less than a second [71].…”