Decentralized Biometric Authentication based on Fuzzy Commitments and Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based biometric authentication protocol that ensures decentralization and privacy by using fuzzy commitments, addressing privacy concerns inherent in blockchain's public nature.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized biometric authentication protocol leveraging fuzzy commitments to protect biometric data on blockchain.

Findings

The protocol enables privacy-preserving biometric authentication on blockchain.

Security analysis shows resilience against relevant attacks.

The approach balances decentralization with biometric privacy protection.

Abstract

Blockchain technology, which was introduced for supporting cryptocurrencies, today provides a decentralized infrastructure for general information storage and execution of algorithms, thus enabling the conversion of many applications and services from a centralized and intermediated model to a decentralized and disintermediated one. In this paper we focus on biometric authentication, which is classically performed using centralized systems, and could hence benefit from decentralization. For such a purpose, however, an inherent contradiction between biometric applications and blockchain technology must be overcome, as the former require keeping biometric features private, while blockchain is a public infrastructure. We propose a blockchain-based biometric authentication protocol that enables decentralization and resilience while protecting the privacy, personal data, and, in particular, biometric features of users. The protocol we propose leverages fuzzy commitment schemes to allow biometric authentication to be performed without disclosing biometric data. We also analyze the security of the protocol we propose by considering some relevant attacks.