Revisiting the false acceptance rate attack on biometric visual cryptographic schemes

Abstract

Visual cryptography is an increasingly popular cryptographic technique which allows for secret sharing and encryption of sensitive data. This method has been extended and applied to secure biometric data in various protocols. In this paper, we propose a general framework to help assess the security of these extended biometric visual cryptographic schemes (e-BVC). First, we formalize the notion of “perfect resistance against false authentication” under our framework and show that our formalization captures the traditional false acceptance attack under plausible assumptions. Second, we modify the traditional false acceptance attack and propose a new and generic strategy for attacking e-BVC schemes. As an application, we present a case analysis for a recent implementation of a face recognition protocol and verify the practical impact of our proposed framework and attack in detail.