Biometric Fingerprint Combination to Improve Anonymity Protection

Abstract

Fingerprint techniques are widely used in authentication systems, therefore its privacy protection becomes an important issue. Securing a stored fingerprint template is very important because once fingerprints are compromised, it cannot be easily revoked. So, we review here a new system for preserving fingerprint confidentiality. In this system, the fingerprint privacy is maintained by combining two different fingerprints into a new identity. In the enrollment phase, two fingerprints are taken from two different fingers. We obtain the minutiae positions of one fingerprint, the orientation of another fingerprint, and the reference points from both fingerprints. Based on the obtained information, a combined minutiae template is generated and stored in a database. In the authentication phase, we use the fingerprints of the same fingers that are already used in enrollment phase. For matching the two query fingerprints against a combined minutiae template, a two-stage fingerprint matching process is used. By storing the combined minutiae template in the database, the complete minutiae characteristic of a single fingerprint will not be compromised when the database is stolen by the attackers. The attacker cannot distinguish a combined minutiae template from the original minutiae templates as there is a similarity in topology. The combined minutiae template is converted into a real-look alike combined fingerprint by using existing fingerprint reconstruction approach. This results into a new virtual identity for the two different fingerprints. This new virtual identity can be matched using minutiae-based fingerprint matching algorithms. The main objective of this paper is to review the fingerprint privacy protection schemes.