Multimodal Biometric Systems, its Security Issues, Research Challenges and Countermeasures—Technical Review

Abstract

AbstractA biometric system is an amalgamation of algorithms that uses an individual’s unique biological data innate physical features (fingerprints, retina, face, ears, etc.) or behavioural features (signature, voice, keystroke dynamics, etc.) or both to authenticate the individual. This essentially makes a biometric system function as a pattern recognition system that helps an individual in any kind of adversarial environment. Hence, like any conventional authentication system, it is vulnerable to the attacks of malicious adversaries that try to manipulate the data and thus decline the security of the system by compromising its robustness. These possible attacks have not been considered while developing most biometric authentication systems. Our work describes multimodal biometrics, its feature extraction methods, research challenges and focuses on the major security issues in both unimodal and multimodal biometric systems. This paper summarizes some robust multimodal systems, their countermeasures and algorithms that have been devised to tackle these security challenges.KeywordsBiometricsMultimodal biometricsBiometric fusionSecurityAttacksCountermeasuresEncryption