Secure and Privacy Preserving Proxy Biometrics Identities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for creating artificial proxy fingerprints that enhance security and privacy by being non-invertible, revocable, and user-specific, enabling safe biometric applications in online environments.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach for generating proxy biometric templates from original fingerprints using user-specific keys, improving privacy and revocability in biometric systems.

Findings

Proxy fingerprints can be generated with performance comparable to original ones.

The approach achieves zero FAR and FRR in secure scenarios.

The method enhances revocability and diversity of biometric templates.

Abstract

With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial fingerprints also called proxy fingerprints that are natural looking, non-invertible, revocable and privacy preserving. These proxy biometrics can be generated from original ones only with the help of a user-specific key. Instead of using the original fingerprint, these proxy templates can be used anywhere with same convenience. The manuscripts walks through an interesting way in which proxy fingerprints of different types can be generated and how they can be combined with use-specific keys to provide revocability and cancelability in case of compromise. Using the proposed approach a proxy dataset is generated from samples belonging to Anguli fingerprint database. Matching experiments were performed on the new set which is 5 times larger than the original, and it was found that their performance is at par with 0 FAR and 0 FRR in the stolen key, safe key scenarios. Other parameters on revocability and diversity are also analyzed for protection performance.