Secret Locking: Exploring New Approaches to Biometric Key Encapsulation

Abstract

Biometrics play an increasingly important role in the context of access control techniques as they promise to overcome the problems of forgotten passwords or passwords that can be guessed easily. In this paper we introduce and provide a formal definition of the notion of secret locking which generalizes a previously introduced concept for cryptographic key extraction from biometrics. We give details on an optimized implementation of the scheme which show that its performance allows the system for use in practice. In addition, we introduce an extended framework to analyze the security of the scheme. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.