Multi-modal biometrics with PKI technologies for border control applications

Abstract

It is widely recognized that multi-modal biometrics has the potential to strengthen border protection by reducing the risk of passport fraud. However, it may take high costs to issue smart-card enabled passports over the world and to process a huge amount of biometric information (on-line). A public key cryptography is another useful tool for verifying a person's identity in a stringent way, but a key management is one of critical problems arising from the use of cryptographic schemes. For example, a passport-holder should keep a private key in a smart-card-level device while an inspecting officer accesses a corresponding public key in an authentic manner. In this paper, we present a low-cost but highly-scalable method that uses multi-modal biometrics based on face and fingerprints, and public key infrastructures (PKIs) for border control applications. A digital signature in PKIs and multi-modal biometrics are carefully applied in our scheme, in order to reduce the possibility of undesirable factors significantly at nation's borders without requiring any hardware device in passports. We could print a (publicly readable) barcodes on the passport instead of requiring the smart-card-level devices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.