Paper 2017/340

Enhancing Security by Combining Biometrics and Cryptography

Diana Popa and Emil Simion

Abstract

The impressive amount of recent technological advancements in the area of information systems have brought along, besides the multitude of positive aspects, some negative aspects too. The most obvious one is represented by the fact that the technological innovations are prone to various categories of threats. Making sure that information stays safe, unaltered and secret is an integral part of providing technology that behaves in the manner it is supposed to. Along with researching techniques of effectively securing the communication, other aspects that also deserve to receive attention are authentication, authorization and accounting. One security aspect that has been the most intensely researched in the past from the three, is authentication. From the various methods used in verifying the identity of users, one more recent one is biometrics that can significantly heighten the safety and security of a system. However, authenticating the user into an information system may not be entirely safe all the time. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the different plausible methods of combining cryptography related concepts and biometrics techniques. This additional attachment of cryptography has proven to make the process of gainingaccess to an information system much more secure. The problem tackled in this paper will be presented from a two way perspective: on one hand, it will be discussed how biometrics can make use of cryptography-specific solutions in order to enhance its powers and, on the other hand, it will be presented how cryptography aspects can use the specific biometric data of a user to generate encryption keys that are much harder to decipher or to obtain. After this methods are presented, the theoretical basis for measuring performance of a biometric system will be presented and a survey on current performance results on fuzzy vault techniques will be enumerated and described.

Metadata
Available format(s)
-- withdrawn --
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Contact author(s)
emil simion @ upb ro
History
2017-06-16: withdrawn
2017-04-21: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/340
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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