A New Scheme for the Polynomial Based Biometric Cryptosystems

Amioy Kumar,Hari M Gupta,M Hanmandlu

doi:10.1155/2014/161932

Abstract

This paper presents a new scheme for the fuzzy vault based biometric cryptosystems which explore the feasibility of a polynomial based vault for the biometric traits like iris, palm, vein, and so forth. Gabor filter is used for the feature extraction from the biometric data and the extracted feature points are transformed into Eigen spaces using Karhunen Loeve (K-L) transform. A polynomial obtained from the secret key is used to generate projections from the transformed features and the randomly generated points, known as chaff points. The points and their corresponding projections form the ordered pairs. The union of the ordered pairs from the features and the chaff points creates a fuzzy vault. At the time of decoding, matching scores are computed by comparing the stored and the claimed biometric traits, which are further tested against a predefined threshold. The number of matched scores should be greater than a tolerance value for the successful decoding of the vault. The threshold and the tolerance value are learned from the transformed features at the encoding stage and chosen according to the tradeoff in the error rates. The proposed scheme is tested on a variety of biometric databases and error rates obtained from the experimental results confirm the utility of the new scheme.

Highlights

Intrusions in the secret data protection arena pose potential threat to the information security
Biometric cryptosystems can be broadly divided into two main schemes: (a) Key binding mode, in which the secret key is integrated with the biometric template
The implementation of key binding mode is greatly affected by the cryptographic construct called fuzzy vault, investigated by Juels and Sudan [9]. This fuzzy vault can tolerate the intraclass variability in the biometric data, which has inspired several researchers [1,2,3,4] to pursue the biometrics based fuzzy vaults. This paper proposes another attempt on using fuzzy vault scheme in key binding mode by presenting a new scheme which exploits textural features from biometric traits

Summary

Introduction

Intrusions in the secret data protection arena pose potential threat to the information security. Biometric cryptosystems can be broadly divided into two main schemes: (a) Key binding mode, in which the secret key is integrated with the biometric template In this mechanism, both the biometric template and the key are so locked that it is very difficult to retrieve any one without the information of other [1,2,3,4]. (b) Key generation mode, in which the biometric template generates the keys used in any cryptographic algorithm for the encryption and decryption of secret messages [5,6,7,8] Both the approaches are secure and computationally very difficult for the intruder to attack. The biometric data acquired at different times is substantially different, due to the intraclass variations, necessitating a different key every time

Results

Discussion

Conclusion