Evaluation of direct attacks to fingerprint verification systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of fingerprint verification systems to direct attacks, evaluating two different systems on real and fake fingerprints to assess their robustness under various scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of minutiae-based and ridge feature-based fingerprint systems against direct attacks, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.

Findings

Both systems show vulnerabilities to direct attacks.

Fingerprint image quality influences system robustness.

Operational scenarios significantly affect attack success rates.

Abstract

The vulnerabilities of fingerprint-based recognition systems to direct attacks with and without the cooperation of the user are studied. Two different systems, one minutiae-based and one ridge feature-based, are evaluated on a database of real and fake fingerprints. Based on the fingerprint images quality and on the results achieved on different operational scenarios, we obtain a number of statistically significant observations regarding the robustness of the systems.