Privacy-preserving biometric authentication and matching via lattice-based encryption

Abstract

The continuous dependence on electronic media has radically changed our interactions, many of which are now performed online. In many occasions users need to authenticate to remote machines, but the hostile environment of the Internet may severely expose users and service providers. To counter these shortcomings, strong authentication is pushed forward. As a means to authenticate individuals, biometric authentication is gradually gaining more and more ground. While the use of biometric data enables many useful applications, these data are very sensitive. For this reason, it is essential to handle them with the least user exposure. In this work we propose a very efficient protocol for privacy-preserving biometric authentication using lattice-based encryption. More precisely, we exploit the homomorphic properties of NTRU to provide a robust and secure solution and provide experimental results which illustrate the efficacy of our proposal.