Securing Face and Fingerprint Templates in Humanitarian Biometric Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, secure biometric template protection scheme suitable for humanitarian scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness on face and fingerprint data with promising results.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of PolyProtect, a novel BTP method, applied to face and fingerprint biometrics in humanitarian contexts.

Findings

PolyProtect is effective for face verification and identification.

PolyProtect achieves high irreversibility and unlinkability.

First evaluation of PolyProtect on fingerprint biometrics.

Abstract

In humanitarian and emergency scenarios, the use of biometrics can dramatically improve the efficiency of operations, but it poses risks for the data subjects, which are exacerbated in contexts of vulnerability. To address this, we present a mobile biometric system implementing a biometric template protection (BTP) scheme suitable for these scenarios. After rigorously formulating the functional, operational, and security and privacy requirements of these contexts, we perform a broad comparative analysis of the BTP landscape. PolyProtect, a method designed to operate on neural network face embeddings, is identified as the most suitable method due to its effectiveness, modularity, and lightweight computational burden. We evaluate PolyProtect in terms of verification and identification accuracy, irreversibility, and unlinkability, when this BTP method is applied to face embeddings extracted using EdgeFace, a novel state-of-the-art efficient feature extractor, on a real-world face dataset from a humanitarian field project in Ethiopia. Moreover, as PolyProtect promises to be modality-independent, we extend its evaluation to fingerprints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that PolyProtect has been evaluated for the identification scenario and for fingerprint biometrics. Our experimental results are promising, and we plan to release our code