Operational bio-hash to preserve privacy of fingerprint minutiae templates

Abstract

The storage of fingerprints is an important issue as this biometric modality is more and more deployed for real applications. Considering minutiae templates as sensitive information, a key question concerns the secure and privacy management of this digital identity. Indeed, if an attacker obtains the minutiae template of a subject, he/she will be able to generate a fingerprint having the same characteristics. Instead of directly storing the minutiae templates, the authors propose in this study a new adaptation of BioHashing to generate a cancellable template in the context of un-ordered set of noisy minutiae features. To the authors knowledge, little interest has been paid in the literature to the question of protecting minutiae template by BioHashing until now. Using the FVC2002 benchmark database, they show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in term of privacy preservation. They show how the proposed method copes with irreversibility and diversity properties and therefore can be efficient in a realistic context. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2013.