The Hill Cipher

Abstract

Tremendous use of biometric based authentication systems has led to increased attacks on biometric data. It has given rise to several concerns regarding security and privacy of biometrics data. Biometrics are immutable and limited resources; and once compromised renders them insecure for further usage. To address these concerns Ratha et al. (2001) proposed the concept of cancelable biometrics, which transforms a biometric data and then uses it for storing and matching purposes. This work proposes a Hill cipher based technique to transform biometric signals. Experiments are performed on face and palmprint biometric modalities and important criteria like security, diversity, non-invertibility, and performance are thoroughly analyzed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.