RSA Key Generation from Cancelable Fingerprint Biometrics

Abstract

The current cryptographic algorithms are suffering from the drawback of maintaining the secrecy of private keys. These private keys must be taken care of so that the cost of privacy can be avoided. Stored private keys are generally secured by the user tailored passwords, which can be hacked by brute-force attacks. Also, it is quite a horrid issue for the user to play with those large keys. So, the major issue is to protect and manage such a long private key. The generation of cryptographic key from individual user's biometric feature is a viable option. In this way it is too difficult for the attacker to guess the cryptographic key without having access of the user's biometrics. But the problem is that once it gets compromised it goes to waste. To solve the aforesaid issues cancelable biometrics approach has been proposed which is a wonderful solution for cancelling and reissuing the biometrics template. In this paper, a way to generate cryptographic key from the cancelable fingerprint template of the user has been suggested. Shuffling based transformation method is applied on the minutia points extracted from the user's fingerprint to generate cancelable template. Then a pair of private and public key is generated for RSA cryptosystems from cancelable template. This cancelable template maintains the secrecy of fingerprint template and produce revocable key for asymmetric cryptography.