Secured Cryptographic Key Generation From Multimodal Biometrics Feature Level Fusion Of Fingerprint And Iris

TL;DR

This paper presents a multimodal biometric system combining fingerprint and iris features to generate a secure cryptographic key, enhancing security by leveraging multiple biometric modalities and feature-level fusion.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient multimodal biometric approach for cryptographic key generation using feature-level fusion of fingerprint and iris data, with a 256-bit key output.

Findings

Effective feature extraction from fingerprint and iris images.

Successful fusion of biometric features at the feature level.

Generation of a secure 256-bit cryptographic key.

Abstract

Human users have a tough time remembering long cryptographic keys. Hence, researchers, for so long, have been examining ways to utilize biometric features of the user instead of a memorable password or passphrase, in an effort to generate strong and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our objective is to incorporate the volatility of the users biometric features into the generated key, so as to make the key unguessable to an attacker lacking significant knowledge of the users biometrics. We go one step further trying to incorporate multiple biometric modalities into cryptographic key generation so as to provide better security. In this article, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generation of secure cryptographic key. The proposed approach is composed of three modules namely, 1) Feature extraction, 2) Multimodal biometric template generation and 3) Cryptographic key generation. Initially, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Subsequently, the extracted features are fused together at the feature level to construct the multibiometric template. Finally, a 256bit secure cryptographic key is generated from the multibiometric template. For experimentation, we have employed the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.