Attacks on biometric systems: a case study in fingerprints

By Umut Uludag, Anil K. Jain. IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2004

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In spite of numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems based on token or knowledge, they are vulnerable to attacks that can decrease their security considerably. In this paper, we analyze these attacks in the realm of a fingerprint biometric system. We propose an attack system that uses a hill climbing procedure to synthesize the target minutia templates and evaluate its feasibility with extensive experimental results conducted on a large fingerprint database. Several measures that can be utilized to decrease the probability of such attacks and their ramifications are also presented.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51a8b47448749460563c4e114e1bc1e06522a702

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Citations in the corpus

Multiple classifier systems for robust classifier design in adversarial environments (2010, background): “Some works analysed the vulnerability of different classifiers used in IDSs [20,34] and in biometric verification systems [53,22].”
Unconstrained Face Recognition: Identifying a Person of Interest From a Media Collection (2014, background): “We did not consider age in this paper due to large variations in age estimates by crowd workers.”
On the vulnerability of face verification systems to hill-climbing attacks (2010, background): “Some examples include an indirect attack to a face-based system in [9], and to standard and Match-on-Card minutiae-based fingerprint verification systems in [10] and [11] respectively.”
Biometrics: a tool for information security (2006, background): “Jain and Ross improved the performance of a multibiometric system by learning user-specific parameters [35].”
Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey (2018, background): “The first of the key risks is related to data spoofing that would be successfully accepted by the MFA system [177].”
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].”
LBP − T OP based countermeasure against face spooﬁng attacks (2012, background): “[23], [14] and [18] indicate that fingerprint authentication systems suffer from similar weakness.”
An evaluation of indirect attacks and countermeasures in fingerprint verification systems (2011, methodology): “The indirect attacks implemented for the evaluation are known as hill climbing attacks (Uludag and Jain, 2004), and are directed to the input of the matcher (point 4 of attack in Fig.”