Efficient biometric palm-print matching on smart-cards for high security and privacy

Abstract

Smart control access to any service is at the very basis of any smart city project. Biometrics have been used as a solution for system access control, for many years now. However, the simple use of biometrics can not be considered as final and perfect solution. Most problems are related to the data transmission way between the medias, where the users require access and the servers where the biometric data, captured upon registration, are stored. In this paper, the use smart-cards is adopted as a possible effective yet efficient solution to this problem. Palm-prints have been used as a human identifier for a long time now. This biometric is considered one of the most reliable to distinguish a person from another as its unique yet stable over time. In this work, we propose an efficient implementation of palm-print verification on smart-cards. For this implementation, the matching is done on-card. Thus, the biometric characteristics are always kept in the owner’s card, guaranteeing the maximum security and privacy. In a first approach, the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR) are improved using upward, downward, leftward and rightward translations of the matched palm-codes. However, after thorough analysis of the achieved results, we show that the proposed method introduces a significant increase in terms of execution time of the matching operation. In order to mitigate this impact, we augmented the proposed technique with an acceptance threshold verification, thus decreasing drastically the execution time of the matching operation, and yet achieving considerably low FAR and FRR. It is noteworthy to point out that these characteristics are at the basis of any access control successful usage.