Smart cards to enhance security and privacy in biometrics

Abstract

Smart cards are portable secure devices designed to hold personal and service information for many kind of applications. Examples of the use of smart cards are cell phone user identification (e.g. GSM SIM card), banking cards (e.g. EMV credit/debit cards) or citizen cards. Smart cards and Biometrics can be used jointly in different kinds of scenarios. Being a secure portable device, smart cards can be used for storing securely biometric references (e.g. templates) of the cardholder, perform biometric operations such as the comparison of an external biometric sample with the on-card stored biometric reference, or even relate operations within the card to the correct execution and result of those biometric operations.In order to provide the reader of the book with an overview of this technology, this chapter provides a description of smart cards, from their origin till the current technology involved, focusing especially in the security services they provide. Once the technology and the security services are introduced, the chapter will detail how smart cards can be integrated in biometric systems, which will be summarized in four different strategies: Store-on-Card, On-Card Biometric Comparison, Work-sharing Mechanism, and System-on-Card.Also the way to evaluate the joint use of smart cards and Biometrics will be described; both at the performance level, as well as its security. Last, but not least, this chapter will illustrate the collaboration of both technologies by providing two examples of current major deployments.