Blockchain meets Biometrics: Concepts, Application to Template Protection, and Trends
This addresses the unsolved issue of biometric template protection for security applications, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method (blockchain) to a new domain (biometrics).
The paper tackles the problem of securing biometric templates by integrating blockchain technology, experimentally evaluating trade-offs like latency, processing time, economic cost, and biometric performance through a smart contract implementation on Ethereum.
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.