Secret Distribution for Secure Fingerprint Verification

Recently, in the smart-card based authentication system, there is an increasing trend of using fingerprint for the card holder verification, instead of passwords. However, the security of the fingerprint data is particularly important as the possible compromise of the data will be permanent. In this paper, we propose an approach for secure fingerprint verification by distributing both the secret and the computation based on the fuzzy vault (a cryptographic construct which has been proposed for crypto-biometric systems). That is, a user fingerprint template which is applied to the fuzzy vault is divided into two parts, and each part is stored into a smart-card and a server, respectively. At distributing the fingerprint template, we consider both the security level and the verification accuracy. Then, the geometric hashing technique is applied to solve the fingerprint alignment problem, and this computation is also distributed over the combination of the smart-card and the server in the form of the challenge-response. Finally, the polynomial can be reconstructed from the accumulated real points from both the smart-card and the server. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that our proposed approach can perform the fuzzy vault-based fingerprint verification more securely on a combination of a smart-card and a server without significant degradation of the verification accuracy.