CT-ISG Security and Privacy of Biometric Templates: Theory and Practice

Polytechnic University Of New York, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to develop simple, practical and provably effective cryptographic techniques for the security and privacy of biometric data. The proposed research will formulate rigorous notions of security and privacy for real world biometric data, which may be continuous and with complex similarity measures. This will be done by developing error-tolerant techniques that can be applied to achieve the targeted security and privacy requirements. The proposed approach is mainly based on recent devel- opments in error-tolerant cryptography centered around the idea of a secure sketch. In fact, well known error tolerant schemes like fuzzy commitment and fuzzy vault can be considered as special cases of the general notion of secure sketch. The secure sketch framework is a promising approach for protecting biometric data. Not only is it more amenable to combination with signal processing techniques for application to real biometric data, but it also provides provable security under reasonable assumptions. The techniques developed will be implemented and an investigation of their performance in terms of false accepts and false rejects will be carried out along with and analysis of the trade-off between the performance and the security. Practical cryptographic protocols for biometric applications under a variety of threat models will also be developed. Furthermore, techniques to enhance security using multimodal biometrics and/or multi-factor schemes will be studied.