Blockchain technologies provide excellent architectures and practical tools for securing and managing the sensitive and private data stored in biometric templates, but at a cost. We discuss opportunities and challenges in the integration of blockchain and biometrics, with emphasis in biometric template storage and protection, a key problem in biometrics still largely unsolved. Key tradeoffs involved in that integration, namely, latency, processing time, economic cost, and biometric performance are experimentally studied through the implementation of a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain platform, which is publicly available in github for research purposes.
Hochschule Darmstadt（达姆施塔特应用技术大学）；Universität Salzburg（萨尔茨堡大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Today, deep learning represents the most popular and successful form of machine learning. Deep learning has revolutionised the field of pattern recognition, including biometric recognition. Biometric systems utilising deep learning have been shown to achieve auspicious recognition accuracy, surpassing human performance. Apart from said breakthrough advances in terms of biometric performance, the use of deep learning was reported to impact different covariates of biometrics such as algorithmic fairness, vulnerability to attacks, or template protection. Technologies of biometric template protect…
Blockchain has been emerging as a promising technology that could totally change the landscape of data security in the coming years, particularly for data access over Internet-of-Things and cloud servers. However, blockchain itself, though secured by its protocol, does not identify who owns the data and who uses the data. Other than simply encrypting data into keys, in this paper, we proposed a protocol called Biometric Blockchain (BBC) that explicitly incorporate the biometric cues of individuals to unambiguously identify the creators and users in a blockchain-based system, particularly to ad…
Blockchain and Biometrics: Survey, GDPR Analysis, and Future Directions
Biometrics and Data Pattern Analytics Lab, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain（生物特征与数据模式分析实验室，马德里自治大学，西班牙）；Biometric Law Lab, Centre for IT & IP Law (CITIP), KU Leuven, Belgium（生物特征法律实验室，信息与知识产权法中心（CITIP），鲁汶大学，比利时）
We devised a mobile biometric-based authentication system only relying on local processing. Our Android open source solution explores the capability of current smartphones to acquire, process and match fingerprints using only its built-in hardware. Our architecture is specifically designed to run completely locally and autonomously, not requiring any cloud service, server, or permissioned access to fingerprint reader hardware. It involves three main stages, starting with the fingerprint acquisition using the smartphone camera, followed by a processing pipeline to obtain minutiae features and a…
Despite a variety of theoretical-sound techniques have been proposed for biometric template protection, there is rarely practical solution that guarantees non-invertibility, cancellability, non-linkability and performance simultaneously. In this paper, a ranking-based representational transformation is proposed for fingerprint templates. The proposed method transforms a real-valued feature vector into index code such that the pairwise-order measure in the resultant codes are closely correlated with rank similarity measure. Such a ranking based technique offers two major merits: 1) Resilient to…
Computationally efficient, accurate, and privacy-preserving data storage and retrieval are among the key challenges faced by practical deployments of biometric identification systems worldwide. In this work, a method of protected indexing of biometric data is presented. By utilising feature-level fusion of intelligently paired templates, a multi-stage search structure is created. During retrieval, the list of potential candidate identities is successively pre-filtered, thereby reducing the number of template comparisons necessary for a biometric identification transaction. Protection of the bi…
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Hochschule Darmstadt（达姆施塔特应用科学大学）
Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that implement fundamental data protection principles. With respect to biometric recognition, different types of privacy-enhancing technologies have been introduced for protecting stored biometric data which are generally classified as sensitive. In this regard, various taxonomies and conceptual categorizations have been proposed and standardization activities have been carried out. However, these efforts have mainly been devoted to certain sub-categories of privacy-enhancing technologies and therefore lack generalization. This work provides an o…
Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Beijing Friendship Hospital（北京友谊医院）
Powerful recognition algorithms are widely used in the Internet or important medical systems, which poses a serious threat to personal privacy. Although the law provides for diversity protection, e.g. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and Articles 1032 to 1039 of the civil code in China. However, as an important privacy disclosure event, biometric data is often hidden, which is difficult for the owner to detect and trace to the source. Human biometrics generally exist in images. In order to avoid the disclosure of personal privacy, we should prevent unauthorized recogniti…
Biometric technologies, especially face recognition, have become an essential part of identity management systems worldwide. In deployments of biometrics, secure storage of biometric information is necessary in order to protect the users' privacy. In this context, biometric cryptosystems are designed to meet key requirements of biometric information protection enabling a privacy-preserving storage and comparison of biometric data. This work investigates the application of a well-known biometric cryptosystem, i.e. the improved fuzzy vault scheme, to facial feature vectors extracted through deep…
In identity management system, frequently used biometric recognition system needs awareness towards issue of protecting biometric template as far as more reliable solution is apprehensive. In sight of this biometric template protection algorithm should gratify the basic requirements viz. security, discriminability and cancelability. As no single template protection method is capable of satisfying these requirements, a novel scheme for face template generation and protection is proposed. The novel scheme is proposed to provide security and accuracy in new user enrolment and authentication proce…
In identity management system, commonly used biometric recognition system needs attention towards issue of biometric template protection as far as more reliable solution is concerned. In view of this biometric template protection algorithm should satisfy security, discriminability and cancelability. As no single template protection method is capable of satisfying the basic requirements, a novel technique for face template generation and protection is proposed. The novel approach is proposed to provide security and accuracy in new user enrollment as well as authentication process. This novel te…
Anhui University（安徽大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of Sassari（萨萨里大学）
Cancelable biometrics (CB) employs an irreversible transformation to convert the biometric features into transformed templates while preserving the relative distance between two templates for security and privacy protection. However, distance preservation invites unexpected security issues such as pre-image attacks, which are often neglected.This paper presents a generalized pre-image attack method and its extension version that operates on practical CB systems. We theoretically reveal that distance preservation property is a vulnerability source in the CB schemes. We then propose an empirical…
Palmprint recognition has become more and more popular due to its advantages over other biometric modalities such as fingerprint, in that it is larger in area, richer in information and able to work at a distance. However, the issue of palmprint privacy and security (especially palmprint template protection) remains under-studied. Among the very few research works, most of them only use the directional and orientation features of the palmprint with transformation processing, yielding unsatisfactory protection and identification performance. Thus, this paper proposes a palmprint template protec…
Monash University Malaysia（莫纳什大学马来西亚分校）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
Cancellable biometrics (CB) as a means for biometric template protection approach refers to an irreversible yet similarity preserving transformation on the original template. With similarity preserving property, the matching between template and query instance can be performed in the transform domain without jeopardizing accuracy performance. Unfortunately, this trait invites a class of attack, namely similarity-based attack (SA). SA produces a preimage, an inverse of transformed template, which can be exploited for impersonation and cross-matching. In this paper, we propose a Genetic Algorith…
Indian Institute of Technology Jammu（印度理工学院贾姆穆分校）；National Institute of Informatics（国立情报学研究所）；Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing Jabalpur（印度信息技术设计制造学院贾巴尔普尔分校）
With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial fingerprints also called proxy fingerprints that are natural looking, non-invertible, revocable and privacy preserving. These proxy biometrics can be generated from original ones only with the help of a user-specific key. Instead of using the original fingerprint, these proxy templates can be used anywhere with same convenience. The manuscripts walks through an i…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Current research on soft-biometrics showed that privacy-sensitive information can be deduced from biometric templates of an individual. Since for many applications, these templates are expected to be used for recognition purposes only, this raises major privacy issues. Previous works focused on supervised privacy-enhancing solutions that require privacy-sensitive information about individuals and limit their application to the suppression of single and pre-defined attributes. Consequently, they do not take into account attributes that are not considered in the training. In this work, we presen…
Hashing technology gains much attention in protecting the biometric template lately. For instance, Index-of-Max (IoM), a recent reported hashing technique, is a ranking-based locality sensitive hashing technique, which illustrates the feasibility to protect the ordered and fixed-length biometric template. However, biometric templates are not always in the form of ordered and fixed-length, rather it may be an unordered and variable size point set e.g. fingerprint minutiae, which restricts the usage of the traditional hashing technology. In this paper, we proposed a generalized version of IoM ha…
