Security Considerations in Minutiae-Based Fuzzy Vaults

Abstract

The fuzzy vault scheme is a cryptographic primitive that can be used to protect human fingerprint templates where stored. Analyses for most implementations account for brute-force security only. There are, however, other risks that have to be consider, such as false-accept attacks, record multiplicity attacks, and information leakage from auxiliary data, such as alignment parameters. In fact, the existing work lacks analyses of these weaknesses and are even susceptible to a variety of them. In view of these vulnerabilities, we redesign a minutiae-based fuzzy vault implementation preventing an adversary from running attacks via record multiplicity. Furthermore, we propose a mechanism for robust absolute fingerprint prealignment. In combination, we obtain a fingerprint-based fuzzy vault that resists known record multiplicity attacks and that does not leak information about the protected fingerprints from auxiliary alignment data. By experiments, we evaluate the performance of our security-improved implementation that, even though it has slight usability merits as compared with other minutiae-based implementations, provides improved security. However, despite heavy efforts spent in improving security, our implementation is, like all other implementations based on a single finger, subjected to a fundamental security limitation related to the false acceptance rate, i.e., false-accept attack. Consequently, this paper supports the notion that a single finger is not sufficient to provide acceptable security. Instead, implementations for multiple finger or even multiple modalities should be deployed the security of which may be improved by the technical contributions of this paper.