Privacy Preserving Bio-Metric Authentication

Abstract

Abstract: Biometric authentication is now extensively used in several systems and applications to authenticate users using their biometrics. The biometrics of the users are compared to the biometric templates already stored on the server, and if there is a match, only the user is permitted to enter the system. However, because each user's biometrics are unique, it is more important than the user's actual biometric data is never leaked. Moreover, the utilization of the user's actual biometric data for comparisons during the authentication process can't be done because the revelation of the user's actual biometrics to the server should not be done. Throughout authentication, each user will encrypt his biometrics and then transmit this encrypted data to the server for comparison, and this data will never be decrypted for privacy reasons during the whole authentication process. To compare two encrypted data without decrypting them, the present study uses the homomorphic properties of the Pailler cryptosystem which will be the encryption of the algorithm for the comparison part. The use of Euclidean Distance is made to find the squared distance between the users’ queried feature vector and the templates stored into the server. In the end, among all the distances, the minimum distance will be chosen and will compare with some predefined threshold to decide whether the user is an authenticated user or not.