Fingerprint Template Protection Using Fuzzy Vault

Abstract

Biometric-based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as the compromise of the data will be permanent. To protect the biometric data, we need to store it in a non-invertible transformed version. Thus, even if the transformed version is compromised, the actual biometric data remains safe. In this paper, we propose an approach to protect fingerprint templates by using the idea of the fuzzy vault. Fuzzy vault is a recently developed cryptographic construct to secure critical data with the fingerprint data in a way that only the authorized user can access the secret by providing the valid fingerprint. We modify the fuzzy vault to protect fingerprint templates and to perform fingerprint verification with the protected template at the same time. This is challenging because the fingerprint verification is performed in the domain of the protected form. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach can perform the fingerprint verification with the protected template.