Biometric Template Security

By Anil K. Jain, Karthik Nandakumar, Abhishek Nagar. 2008

1,371 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society.

Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Information Systems, Signal Processing

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Citations in the corpus

An evaluation of indirect attacks and countermeasures in fingerprint verification systems (2011, background): “In the last few years, template protection schemes have been proposed as a feasible approach to biometric system security (Jain et al., 2008).”
Minutia Cylinder-Code: A New Representation and Matching Technique for Fingerprint Recognition (2010, background): “Template protection is currently receiving much attention because of the great benefits it can provide (e.g., nonreversibility, diversity, and revocability) [39], [1].”
Poisoning attacks to compromise face templates (2013, background): “, matching of hashed or encrypted templates [6]).”
Secure and Robust Iris Recognition Using Random Projections and Sparse Representations (2011, methodology): “See [6], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], and the references therein for more details.”
Secure Face Matching Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (2018, background): “[18] for a more comprehensive treatment of this topic.”
Security evaluation of biometric authentication systems under real spoofing attacks (2012, background): “Some works have revealed that not only individual modules of a biometric system can be attacked, but also the channel connecting them [27, 7, 32, 17].”
Multibiometric Cryptosystems Based on Feature-Level Fusion (2012, background): “A number of techniques have been proposed to secure biometric templates (see [4] for a detailed review).”
Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey (2018, background): “Such theft may primarily occur due to insecure transmission from the input device through extraction and matching blocks to the database, and there is potential for an attack [180].”
50 years of biometric research: Accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities (2016, positive): “t a b s b w r c p o a a r lyzed the security threats faced by a biometric system and sugested remedial measures [37,79] .”
Biometric Antispoofing Methods: A Survey in Face Recognition (2014, background): “As a consequence, in recent years, there has been an increasing interest on the evaluation of biometric systems security, which has led to the creation of numerous and very diverse initiatives focused on this field of research [17], [18]: publication of many research works disclosing and evaluating ”
A survey on biometric cryptosystems and cancelable biometrics (2011, methodology): “As opposed to existing literature [4,8], which intends to review BCSs and CB at coarse level, this article provides the reader with detailed descriptions of all existing key concepts and follow-up developments.”
Toward an attack-sensitive tamper-resistant biometric recognition with a symmetric matcher: A fingerprint case study (2014, background): “• A T -spoof attack has a low liveness score but can produce a similarity score that is surprisingly much higher than the genuine matching score.”
Robustness of multi-modal biometric verification systems under realistic spoofing attacks (2011, background): “A spoofing attack consists in submitting an artificial replica of a biometric trait to the sensor [1].”
Cancelable Biometrics: A review (2015, background): “Several biometric template protection schemes have been proposed in the literature [2]–[8].”