Robust biometric authentication from an information theoretic perspective

Abstract

Robust biometric authentication is studied from an information theoretic perspective. Compound sources are used to account for uncertainty in the knowledge of the source statistics and are further used to model certain attack classes. It is shown that authentication is robust against source uncertainty and a special class of attacks under the strong secrecy condition. A single-letter characterization of the privacy secrecy capacity region is derived for the generated and chosen secret key model. Furthermore, the question is studied whether small variations of the compound source lead to large losses of the privacy secrecy capacity region. It is shown that biometric authentication is robust in the sense that its privacy secrecy capacity region depends continuously on the compound source.