Reducing vulnerability of a fingerprint authentication system

Abstract

A fingerprint authentication system usually suffers from privacy problem. A third party intruder can steal the information stored in the database and try to recreate the original fingerprint. Here a system is proposed which prevents the possibility of generating fingerprints from the information in the database. Two different fingerprints are acquired from a person. Then the orientation of ridges is calculated from the first fingerprint and minutiae points are extracted from a reference area in second fingerprint. They are combined to form a mixed template which is encrypted using blowfish cipher. The encrypted template serves as a virtual biometric. This prevents the revealing of original fingerprints to third party intruders. Moreover the attacker may not be aware that it is a mixed template that is used rather than the original fingerprint.