Privacy is an important concern when biometrics are used in authentication systems for accessing Electronic Health Records (EHR) or other biomedical research data repositories involving human subjects. Biometrics of individuals deserve careful protection because they contain sensitive information closely related to personal privacy (e.g., personal health, ethnic group, etc.) and the leakage of such information can be used to re-identify individuals. More importantly, biometrics are unique and they are not easily revocable. Existing secure biometric systems prevent attackers from collecting unprotected biometrics in databases, however, they cannot guarantee confidentiality in probing and transmitting biometrics. We propose a practical privacy-preserving biometric system for secure fingerprint authentication based on non-asymmetric Slepian-Wolf codes, for which biometric features from both probe devices and databases are protected (i.e., secure storage and transmission). The proposed framework is suitable for the scenario involving distributed and mobile devices. Besides biometric transmission and authentication in a privacy-preserving manner, experimental results show that the proposed system also achieves a reasonably high authentication accuracy (i.e., 96%).
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