Secure Biometrics: Concepts, Authentication Architectures and Challenges
This is an incremental review article that surveys existing concepts and challenges in biometric security for researchers and practitioners.
The paper addresses the privacy and security challenges of biometrics due to their noisy and irreplaceable nature, presenting an overview of secure biometrics as a class of methods to protect biometric templates.
BIOMETRICS are an important and widely used class of methods for identity verification and access control. Biometrics are attractive because they are inherent properties of an individual. They need not be remembered like passwords, and are not easily lost or forged like identifying documents. At the same time, bio- metrics are fundamentally noisy and irreplaceable. There are always slight variations among the measurements of a given biometric, and, unlike passwords or identification numbers, biometrics are derived from physical characteristics that cannot easily be changed. The proliferation of biometric usage raises critical privacy and security concerns that, due to the noisy nature of biometrics, cannot be addressed using standard cryptographic methods. In this article we present an overview of "secure biometrics", also referred to as "biometric template protection", an emerging class of methods that address these concerns.