Privacy-aware biometrics : design and implementation of a multimodal verification system

A serious concern in the design and use of biometric authentication systems is the privacy protection of the information derived from human biometric traits, especially since such traits cannot be replaced. Combining cryptography and biometrics, several recent works proposed to build the protection in the biometric templates themselves. While these solutions can increase the confidence in biometric systems when biometric information is stored for verification, they have been shown difficult to apply to real biometrics. In this work we present a biometric authentication technique that exploits multiple biometric traits. It is privacy-aware as it ensures privacy protection and allows the extraction of secure identifiers by means of cryptographic primitives. We also discuss the implementation of our approach by considering, as a significant example, the combination of iris and fingerprint biometrics and present experimental results obtained from real data. The implementation shows the feasibility of the scheme in practical applications.