Securing gait recognition with homomorphic encryption

TL;DR

This paper proposes using homomorphic encryption to secure gait recognition systems, ensuring privacy while maintaining classification accuracy.

Contribution

The novelty lies in applying homomorphic encryption to gait recognition with a vision transformer and HE-compatible classifiers.

Findings

Homomorphic encryption is feasible for secure gait recognition with acceptable accuracy.

Different activation functions and their approximations significantly affect computational complexity.

A trade-off exists between security and performance in encrypted biometric systems.

Abstract

Biometric identification systems offer strong security by relying on unique personal traits. At the same time, they raise significant privacy concerns because compromised biometric data cannot be revoked. This paper explores the use of homomorphic encryption (HE) as a means to protect biometric data during classification and reduce the risk of exposing sensitive information. Our system comprises a feature extractor which operates locally and a classifier which processes encrypted data. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a gait recognition task, employing a vision transformer as a feature extractor and training several HE-compatible classifiers. Through a comprehensive statistical analysis, we evaluate the impact of HE on accuracy and computational complexity, especially with different activation functions and their polynomial approximations. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of secure and accurate gait recognition using HE, while highlighting the trade-off between security and performance.

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