Implementation of automatic fuzzy fingerprint 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 implement the fuzzy fingerprint vault system combining fingerprint verification and fuzzy vault scheme to protect fingerprint templates. 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. However, all the previous results assumed that fingerprint features were pre-aligned. To solve this problem, we perform the automatic alignment of fingerprint features by using the geometric hashing technique. Also, we implement a new RS decoding algorithm based on the Extended Euclidean algorithm proposed by Gao. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach can align fingerprint features automatically in the domain of the fuzzy vault and perform fingerprint verification with the protected template in real-time.