Secret rate - Privacy leakage in biometric systems

Ahlswede and Csiszar [1993] introduced the concept of secret sharing. In their source model two terminals observe two correlated sequences. It is the objective of the terminals to form a common secret by interchanging a public message (helper data) in such a way that the secrecy leakage is negligible. In a biometric setting, where the sequences correspond to the enrollment and authentication data, respectively, it is crucial that the public message leaks as little information as possible about the biometric data, since compromised biometric data cannot be replaced. We investigated the fundamental trade-offs for four biometric settings. The first one is the standard (Ahlswede-Csiszar) secret generation setting, for which we determined the secret-key vs. privacy-leakage rate region. Here leakage corresponds to the mutual information between helper data and biometric enrollment sequence. In the second setting the secret is not generated by the terminals but independently chosen, and transmitted using a public message. Again we determined the region of achievable rate-leakage pairs. In setting three and four we consider zero-leakage, i.e. the public message contains only a negligible amount of information about the secret and about the biometric enrollment sequence. To achieve this a private key is needed, which can be observed only by the terminals. We considered again both secret generation and secret transmission and determined for both cases the region of achievable secret-key vs. private-key rate pairs.