Fingerprint recognition has been considered as the most popular and reliable system for web based person authentication. Fingerprints have unique patterns that can be used to distinguish one fingerprint from another. The fingerprint pattern can be used to enhance the security of existing authentication system by adding a layer of biometric security. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm that is able to distinguish the pattern of one fingerprint from the pattern of another fingerprint using XML mining. But the valuable fingerprint data of a user is at risk as it can be hacked during web based authentication and the data can be easily compromised. Therefore we further enhance the security by extracting the fingerprint features into an xml file and embed the same into an image file using steganography. The encoded file can be used for safe transmission of fingerprints across the web for bio metric authentication. Our proposed system uses a novel method in which xml mining is applied at the server side to make the fingerprint identification faster.