Replay attack prevention for iris biometrics

The paper presents an original, independent of typical cryptographic techniques, method of biometric replay attack prevention for iris biometrics. The proposed solution takes advantage of appropriate enhancements of iris templates and relies on appropriate data alteration within the image space resulting in significant changes of the resulting code in the iris feature space. Proposed methodology may be embedded into any non-reversible iris coding, yet in the reference implementation the authors propose to use an original Zak-Gabor-based iris coding. Minimal dependency between the iris image alteration procedure and the resulting iris template in Zak-Gabor coding enables transmitting the iris image alteration code and the resulting iris template even in a plan text without lessening the systempsilas security. The BIOBASE iris image database, as collected in NASK Biometric Laboratories, was used for the method development. The proposed methodology was evaluated with a body of different image alteration codes and with the use of the largest publicly available database from BATH University - DB 1600. The results prove the high potential of the method.