An authentication protocol with encrypted biometric data

Abstract

At ACISP'07, Bringer et al. introduced a new protocol for achieving biometric authentication with a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme. Their proposal is made to enforce the privacy of biometric data of users. We improve their work in several aspects. Firstly, we show how to replace the basic PIR scheme they used with Lipmaa's which has ones of the best known communication complexity. Secondly, we combine it with Secure Sketches to enable a strict separation between on one hand biometric data which remain the same all along a lifetime and stay encrypted during the protocol execution, and on the other hand temporary data generated for the need of the authentication to a service provider. Our proposition exploits homomorphic properties of Goldwasser-Micali and Paillier cryptosystems. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.