A practical implementation of fuzzy fingerprint vault for smart cards

Abstract

Biometric-based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as the compromise of the data will be permanent. To protect the biometric data, we need to store it in a non-invertible transformed version. Thus, even if the transformed version is compromised, the actual biometric data remain safe. Fuzzy vault is a cryptographic construct to secure critical data with the fingerprint data. In this paper, we implement the fuzzy fingerprint vault, combining fingerprint verification and fuzzy vault scheme to protect fingerprint templates, for the smart card environment. To implement the fuzzy fingerprint vault as a complete system, we have to consider several practical issues such as automatic fingerprint alignment, verification accuracy, template size for storing in the smart card, execution time, error correcting code, etc. Especially, we handled the fingerprints having a few minutiae by applying an adaptive degree of the polynomial, and thus our implementation result can be used for real, large-scale applications.