Polynomial Based Fuzzy Vault Technique for Template Security in Fingerprint Biometrics

Abstract

In recent years the security breaches and fraud transactions are increasing day by day. So there is a necessity for highly secure authentication technologies. The security of an authentication system can be strengthened by using Biometric system rather than the traditional method of authentication like Identity Cards (ID) and password which can be stolen easily. A biometric system works on biometric traits and fingerprint has the maximum share in market for providing biometric authentication as it is reliable, consistent and easy to capture. Although the biometric system is used to provide security to many applications but it is susceptible to different types of assaults too. Among all the modules of the biometric system which needs security, biometric template protection has received great consideration in the past years from the research community due to sensitivity of the biometric data stored in the form of template. A number of methods have been devised for providing template protection. Fuzzy vault is one of the cryptosystem based method of template security. The aim of fuzzy vault technique is to protect the precarious data with the biometric template in a way that only certified user can access the secret by providing valid biometric. In this paper, a modified version of fuzzy vault is presented to increase the level of security to the template and the secret key. The polynomial whose coefficients represent the key is transformed using an integral operator to hide the key where the key can no longer be derived if the polynomial is known to the attacker. The proposed fuzzy vault scheme also prevents the system from stolen key inversion attack. The results are achieved in terms of False Accept Rate (FAR), False Reject Rate (FRR), Genuine Acceptance Rate (GAR) by varying the degree of polynomial and number of biometric samples. It was calculated that for 40 users GAR was found to be 92%, 90%, 85% for degree of polynomial to be 3, 4 and 5 respectively. It was observed that increasing the degree of polynomial decreased the FAR rate, thus increasing the security