Significance of the Transition to Biometric Template Protection: Explore the Future

Abstract

The IT security paradigm evolves from secret-based to biometric identity-based. Biometric identification has gradually become more popular in recent years for handheld devices. Privacy-preserving is a key concern when biometrics is used in authentication systems in the present world today. Nowadays, the declaration of biometric traits has been imposed not only by the government but also by many private entities. There are no proper mechanisms and assurance that biometric traits will be kept safe by such entities. The encryption of biometric traits to avoid privacy attacks is a giant problem. Hence, state-of-the-art safety and security technological solutions must be devised to prevent the loss and misuse of such biometric traits. In this paper, we have identified different cancelable biometrics methods with the possible attacks on the biometric traits and directions on possible countermeasures in order to design a secure and privacy-preserving biometric authentication system. We also proposed a highly secure method for cancelable biometrics using a non-invertible function based on Discrete Cosine Transformation and Index of max hashing. We tested and evaluated the proposed novel method on a standard dataset and achieved good results.