An Application of the Naccache-Stern Knapsack Cryptosystem to Biometric Authentication

We focus on privacy concerns while dealing with biometrics authentication. Our aim is that no biometrics should be leaked during the authentication and that its storage should be secure. Namely, we want to be able to securely match two biometric templates by computing a Hamming distance in a secure way. We propose a new security model for applying biometrics to authentication purposes, and construct a new biometric authentication scheme by exploiting some interesting properties of a new version of the Naccache-Stern knapsack public key encryption system. Our scheme enjoys a number of appealing properties, especially, human users are not required to store any secret.