Assessment of privacy enhancing technologies for biometrics

Biometric privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) include two major groups: Biometric Encryption and Cancelable Biometrics. They enhance both privacy and security of a biometric system, thus embodying the Privacy by Design principles in a way that benefits the individual and minimizes the privacy risks. In this paper, the results of independent third-party evaluation of a commercial biometric PET product are presented. The GenKey “BioCryptic® ID Management System” is evaluated against a benchmark commercial product, Neurotechnology VeriFinger version 6.3. The database contained approximately 20,000 flat fingerprint images from 1,200 subjects. For a two-finger, two images per finger enrollment, the best results are: at FMR = 0.1%, FNMR = 1.54% for the PET System and FNMR = 1.74% for the benchmark system; at FMR = 0.01%, FNMR = 2.41% for the PET System and FNMR = 1.74% for the benchmark system. The results also suggest that specific subjects are substantially more likely than others to cause false matches. Security issues of the PET system are briefly discussed but no security evaluation is performed. The study demonstrates the viability of fingerprint-based PETs from a matching accuracy perspective.