Journal of Biometrics & Biostatistics

Biometric Template Security using Dorsal Hand Vein Fuzzy Vault

Abstract

Biometric system is vulnerable to a variety of attacks aimed at undermining the integrity of the authentication process. More importantly template security is of vital importance in the biometric systems because unlike passwords, stolen biometric templates cannot be revoked. In this paper we describe the various threats that can be encountered by a biometric system. We specifically focus on attacks designed to elicit information about the original biometric data of an individual from the stored template. A few algorithms presented in the literature are discussed in this regard. We also examine techniques that can be used to deter or detect these attacks. Furthermore, we provide experimental results
pertaining to a biometric system combining biometrics with cryptography, that converts dorsal hand vein templates into novel cryptographic structure called fuzzy vault. Initially, the pre-processing steps are applied to dorsal hand vein images for enhancement, smoothing and compression. Subsequently, thinning and binary encoding techniques are employed and then feature extracted. Then the biometric template and the input key are used to generate the fuzzy vault. For decoding, biometric template from dorsal hand vein image is constructed and it is combined with the stored fuzzy vault to generate the final key. The experimentation was conducted using dorsal hand vein databases and the FNMR and FMR values are calculated with and without noise.