A New Framework for Secure Biometric Data Transmission using Block-wise Reversible Data Hiding Through Encryption

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is an emerging area in the field of information security. The RDH schemes are widely explored in the field of cloud computing for data authentication and in medical image transmission for clinical data transmission along with medical images. The RDH schemes allow the data hider to embed sensitive information in digital content in such a way that later it can be extracted while recovering the original image. In this research, we explored the use of the RDH through the encryption scheme in a biometric authentication system. The internet of things (IoT) enabled biometric authentication systems are very common nowadays. In general, in biometric authentication, computationally complex tasks such as feature extraction and feature matching will be performed in a cloud server. The user-side devices will capture biometric data such as the face, fingerprint, or iris and it will be directly communicated to the cloud server for further processing. Since the confidentiality of biometric data needs to be maintained during the transmission, the original biometric data will be encrypted using any one of the data encryption techniques. In this manuscript, we propose the use of RDH through encryption approach to transmit two different biometric data as a single file without compromising confidentiality. The proposed scheme will ensure the integrity of the biometric data during transmission. For data hiding purposes, we have used a block-wise RDH through encryption scheme. The experimental study of the proposed scheme is carried out by embedding fingerprint data in the face images. The validation of the proposed scheme is carried out by extracting the fingerprint details from the face images during image decryption. The scheme ensures the exact recovery of face image images and fingerprint data at the receiver site.