Cancelable biometrics using geometric transformations and bio hashing

Abstract

Biometrics is a security system which includes the physical traits of a person such as facial features, fingerprints, iris detection etc for the verification and authentication of a system. These features are stored as a template also known as a biometric template in database or server. Once the Biometric template is compromised it cannot be changed like the passwords and therefore to ensure cancelability of several biometric templates several papers were introduced. Cancelability is a method of generating a new biometric template from the original template using several approaches and algorithms. In this paper cancelability in biometrics is achieved by applying algorithms such as geometric transformations and bio hashing algorithms. First, at the time of registering user, the traits of a user such as a fingerprint and a face is scanned using a scanner and the biometric template thus obtained is encrypted first using geometric transformation algorithms such as Cartesian transform, polar transform and functional transforms. Then bio hashing is applied to the user specified tokenized random number to the transformed template to obtain the encrypted template. The encrypted template is stored in the database which can be further used for verification. In the case of security attacks which may compromise the biometric template a new set of a template is obtained from the same user by using the different set of tokenized random numbers.