An Effective Scheme for Generating Irrevocable Cryptographic Key from Cancelable Fingerprint Templates

摘要

Unswerving information security mechanisms are the need of the hour for fighting the escalating enormity of identity theft in our society. Besides cryptography being a dominant tool in attaining information security, one of the key confronts in cryptosystems is to preserve the secrecy of the cryptographic keys. The incorporation of biometrics with cryptography will be an effective solution to this problem. Recently generating cryptographic key from biometrics has gained enormous popularity in research community due to its improved performance in providing security. Nevertheless, a biometric is enduringly connected with a user and cannot be altered. Thus, when a biometric identifier is compromised, it is lost everlastingly and probably for every application where that particular biometric is employed. Cancelable biometrics intends to resolve this by building revocable biometric templates. In this paper, we have proposed an effective scheme for generating irrevocable cryptographic key from cancelable fingerprint templates. Initially the minutiae points are extracted from the fingerprints. Afterwards, cancelable templates are generated and irrevocable keys are extracted from the cancelable templates. As the cryptographic key is generated in an irreversible manner, obtaining cancelable fingerprint templates and original fingerprints from the generated key is impossible. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our scheme using fingerprints from publicly available sources. We have also presented the security analysis of the proposed scheme.