Packed Homomorphic Encryption Based on Ideal Lattices and Its Application to Biometrics

Abstract

Among many approaches for privacy-preserving biometric authentication, we focus on the approach with homomorphic encryption, which is public key encryption supporting some operations on encrypted data. In biometric authentication, the Hamming distance is often used as a metric to compare two biometric feature vectors. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to compute the Hamming distance on encrypted data using the homomorphic encryption based on ideal lattices. In our implementation of secure Hamming distance of 2048-bit binary vectors with a lattice of 4096 dimension, encryption of a vector, secure Hamming distance, and decryption respectively take about 19.89, 18.10, and 9.08 milliseconds (ms) on an Intel Xeon X3480 at 3.07 GHz. We also propose a privacy-preserving biometric authentication protocol using our method, and compare it with related protocols. Our protocol has faster performance and shorter ciphertext size than the state-of-the-art prior work using homomorphic encryption.