Fingerprint Identification System: Non-zero Effort Attacks for Immigration Control

Abstract

A growing security issue today in Nigeria is the increased occurrence of identity fraud. Research shows that perpetrators of this act are foreigners who enter the country without any document and are employed as security officers, thereby posing security treats to lives and properties. It has been noted that these foreigners device a means of beating security devices put in place at the border. The Nigerian Immigration uses Automated Fingerprint identification system (AFIS) which is minutiae base and it’s less noise tolerant unlike the correlation base approach. This paper therefore proposes a novel fingerprinting method that can help identify identity fraud. The method combines two approaches namely minutiae and correlation approaches, the idea is to see how the shortcomings of one is complemented by the other and the two approaches processes extraction and matching so as to get good and reliable images. Each of the approaches computes the matching score and the mean of the two resulting scores is taken. The mean is compared with the established threshold such that the system provides response by indicating whether the verification is successful or not. It follows that the adoption of this new method by organizations like the Nigerian Immigration Service will drastically reduce, if not totally eradicate, the level of insecurity in the country.