Efficient Privacy-Preserving Fingerprint-Based Authentication System Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Taeyun Kim,Yongwoo Oh,Hyoungshick Kim

doi:10.1155/2020/4195852

Abstract

To help smartphone users protect their phone, fingerprint-based authentication systems (e.g., Apple’s Touch ID) have increasingly become popular in smartphones. In web applications, however, fingerprint-based authentication is still rarely used. One of the most serious concerns is the lack of technology for securely storing fingerprint data used for authentication. Because scanned fingerprint data are not exactly the same each time, the use of a traditional cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) is infeasible to protect raw fingerprint data. In this paper, we present an efficient privacy-preserving fingerprint authentication system using a fully homomorphic encryption scheme in which fingerprint data are always stored and processed in an encrypted form. We implement a fully working fingerprint authentication system with a fingerprint database (containing 4,000 samples) using the Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (TFHE) library. The proposed system can perform the fingerprint matching process within about 166 seconds (±0.564 seconds) on average.

Highlights

In web applications, fingerprint-based authentication is still rarely used despite its usability advantages over password-based authentication
Unlike password-based authentication, a traditional cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) cannot be used to protect raw fingerprint data because only a partial fingerprint can be typically obtained with noise from a fingerprint sensor on smartphone
We propose an efficient privacy-preserving fingerprint authentication system using a fully homomorphic encryption scheme in which fingerprint data are always stored and processed in an encrypted form

Summary

Introduction

In web applications, fingerprint-based authentication is still rarely used despite its usability advantages over password-based authentication. Because it is very challenging to extract exactly same biometric features each time from the fingerprint sensor even when a physically same fingerprint is used, a fingerprint matching algorithm is generally used to compute the degree of similarity between two fingerprints with their partially matched features [4] For this reason, the user’s biometric information (e.g., raw fingerprint image or fingerprint template) is typically stored in plaintext in the fingerprint database [5]. We propose an efficient privacy-preserving fingerprint authentication system using a fully homomorphic encryption scheme in which fingerprint data are always stored and processed in an encrypted form. To show the feasibility of the proposed system, we implement a fully working fingerprint authentication system with a fingerprint database using the Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (TFHE) library (https://tfhe.github.io/tfhe/).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion