BioEncoding: A Reliable Tokenless Cancelable Biometrics Scheme for Protecting IrisCodes

Cancelable biometric techniques play a vital role in the privacy and security of remote surveillance systems to keep the genuine users’ confidential data safe and away from intruders. This research presents an efficient cancelable biometric framework by exploiting an irreversible hybrid encryption technique that incorporates Deoxyribonucleic, Ribonucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA), and the evolutionary optimization technique of the Genetic Algorithm (GA). So, these techniques are employed to create completely deformed templates from their original ones. Thus, our main contribution is offering a novel biometric security framework that achieves unique randomness characteristics using RNA and DNA sequences and the evolutionary GA-based encryption scheme. The proposed framework produces an entirely unrecognized biometric template by ciphering the main discriminative features of the biometric traits of the authorized clients. The proposed algorithm is first initialized by creating several encrypted biometric images of the original users by employing the logistic map function. Secondly, the initialized encrypted images are transformed into one vector of a binary array. Then, they are converted to their corresponding introns, exons, and consequently, their relevant codons are stored in the cloud database. Thirdly, these relevant codons are replaced by new ones after generating encrypted RNA lists. The utilized encryption key is extracted from the original biometric image after utilizing excessive permutations between its pixels. Then, the GA-based optimization technique is applied to select the most convenient biometric features. Finally, after employing the GA-based cross-over and mutation operations, the chosen features are used to generate the cancelable biometric traits. To validate the security efficacy of the proposed framework, different six biometric databases are used, which are Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) Faces (gray), CASIA v.5 Faces (color), UPOL Iris (gray), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) Ear (color and gray), Fingerprint, and CASIA Palmprint (color and gray). The security performance of the proposed framework is compared to those of recent studies in this field, such as OSH (Optical Scanning Holography) and DRPE (Double Random Phase Encoding). The simulation results prove the superior performance of the proposed framework in terms of all tested evaluation metrics. The proposed framework provides high AROC (Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic) that reaches 0.9990, low FAR (False Acceptance Rate) of 0.0015, more uniform histograms, high correlation values for genuine users, and complete hidden of biometric features. In addition, from a security perspective, the proposed framework accomplishes good entropy, UACI (unified average changing intensity), and NPCR (number of pixels change rate) values that reach 7.9960, 33.55%, and 99.65%, respectively.

Most current security and authentication systems are based on personal biometrics. The security problem is a major issue in the field of biometric systems. This is due to the use in databases of the original biometrics. Then biometrics will forever be lost if these databases are attacked. Protecting privacy is the most important goal of cancelable biometrics. In order to protect privacy, therefore, cancelable biometrics should be non-invertible in such a way that no information can be inverted from the cancelable biometric templates stored in personal identification/verification databases. One methodology to achieve non-invertibility is the employment of non-invertible transforms. This work suggests an encryption process for cancellable speaker identification using a hybrid encryption system. This system includes the 3D Jigsaw transforms and Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT). The proposed scheme is compared with the optical Double Random Phase Encoding (DRPE) encryption process. The evaluation of simulation results of cancellable biometrics shows that the algorithm proposed is secure, authoritative, and feasible. The encryption and cancelability effects are good and reveal good performance. Also, it introduces recommended security and robustness levels for its utilization for achieving efficient cancellable biometrics systems.

Cancelable biometric schemes generate secure biometric templates by combining user specific tokens and biometric data. The main objective is to create irreversible, unlinkable, and revocable templates, with high accuracy of comparison. In this paper, we cryptanalyze two recent cancelable biometric schemes based on a particular locality sensitive hashing function, index-of-max (IoM): Gaussian Random Projection-IoM (GRP-IoM) and Uniformly Random Permutation-IoM (URP-IoM). As originally proposed, these schemes were claimed to be resistant against reversibility, authentication, and linkability attacks under the stolen token scenario. We propose several attacks against GRP-IoM and URP-IoM, and argue that both schemes are severely vulnerable against authentication and linkability attacks. We also propose better, but not yet practical, reversibility attacks against GRP-IoM. The correctness and practical impact of our attacks are verified over the same dataset provided by the authors of these two schemes.

In recent years, biometric, or "who you are," authentication has grown rapidly in acceptance and use. Biometric authentication offers users the convenience of not having to carry a password, PIN, smartcard, etc. Instead, users will use their inherent biometric traits for authentication and, as a result, risk their biometric information being stolen. The security of users' biometric information is of critical importance within a biometric authentication scheme as compromised data can reveal sensitive information: race, gender, illness, etc. A cancellable biometric scheme, the "BioCapsule" scheme, proposed by researchers from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, aims to mask users' biometric information and preserve users' privacy. The BioCapsule scheme can be easily embedded into existing biometric authentication systems, and it has been shown to preserve user-privacy, be resistant to several types of attacks, and have minimal effects on biometric authentication system accuracy. In this research we present a facial authentication system which employs several cutting-edge techniques. We tested our proposed system on several face databases, both with and without the BioCapsule scheme being embedded into our system. By comparing our results, we quantify the effects the BioCapsule scheme, and its security benefits, have on the accuracy of our facial authentication system.

The main aim of biometric-based identification systems is to automatically recognize individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioural characteristics such as fingerprint, face, hand-geometry, among others. These systems offer several advantages over traditional forms of identity protection. However, there are still some important aspects that need to be addressed in these systems. The main questions are concerned with the security of biometric authentication systems since it is important to ensure the integrity and public acceptance of these systems. In order to avoid the problems arising from compromised biometric templates, the concept of cancellable biometrics has recently been introduced. The concept is to transform a biometric trait into a new representation for enrolment and matching. Although cancellable biometrics were proposed to solve privacy concerns, the concept raises new issues, since they make the authentication problem more complex and difficult to solve. Thus, more effective authentication structures are needed to perform these tasks. In this paper, we investigate the use of ensemble systems in cancellable biometrics, using fingerprint-based identification to illustrate the possible benefits accruing. In order to increase the effectiveness of the proposed ensemble systems, three feature selection methods will be used to distribute the attributes among the individual classifiers of an ensemble. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the performance of such well-established structures on transformed biometric data to determine whether they have a positive effect on the performance of this complex and difficult task.

To replace compromised biometric templates, cancelable biometrics has recently been introduced. The concept is to transform a biometric signal or feature into a new one for enrollment and matching. For making cancelable fingerprint templates, previous approaches used either the relative position of a minutia to a core point or the absolute position of a minutia in a given fingerprint image. Thus, a query fingerprint is required to be accurately aligned to the enrolled fingerprint in order to obtain identically transformed minutiae. In this paper, we propose a new method for making cancelable fingerprint templates that do not require alignment. For each minutia, a rotation and translation invariant value is computed from the orientation information of neighboring local regions around the minutia. The invariant value is used as the input to two changing functions that output two values for the translational and rotational movements of the original minutia, respectively, in the cancelable template. When a template is compromised, it is replaced by a new one generated by different changing functions. Our approach preserves the original geometric relationships (translation and rotation) between the enrolled and query templates after they are transformed. Therefore, the transformed templates can be used to verify a person without requiring alignment of the input fingerprint images. In our experiments, we evaluated the proposed method in terms of two criteria: performance and changeability. When evaluating the performance, we examined how verification accuracy varied as the transformed templates were used for matching. When evaluating the changeability, we measured the dissimilarities between the original and transformed templates, and between two differently transformed templates, which were obtained from the same original fingerprint. The experimental results show that the two criteria mutually affect each other and can be controlled by varying the control parameters of the changing functions.

Enforcing security and privacy guarantees for biometric users via protecting their unique and personalized attributes is an important area of research. There are many properties desirable in a biometric template protection scheme, but unfortunately, all of the requirements are not simultaneously fulfilled. In our work, we have tried to address this issue by proposing a cancelable framework for fingerprints which simultaneously provides satisfactory system performance, strong security guarantees, and fast matching procedure. The core of our scheme essentially pivots around the use of cryptographic hash functions which provide the adequate levels of security in the framework. Prior to the hashing stage, we have employed an effective pre-alignment technique and a hexagonal grid based quantization scheme which allows us to overcome constraint such as intra-class variability. Finally, our scheme is made cancelable through traditional salting. We tested our framework on various fingerprint databases and found that the resulting system performances were comparable with other contemporary cancelable schemes (EERs of 5.8%, 5.3%, 15.8%, 14.5% were observed for FVC2002 DB1, DB2, FVC2004 DB1, DB2 databases under the stolen token scenario). Most importantly, we perfectly fulfill the unlinkability, cancelability and diversity requirements, which are verified both theoretically and empirically.

Biometric recognition is more and more employed in authentication and access control of various applications. Biometric data are strongly linked with the user and do not allow revocability nor diversity, without an adapted post-processing. Cancelable biometrics, including the very popular algorithm BioHashing, is used to cope with the underlying privacy and security issues. The principle is to transform a biometric template in a BioCode, in order to enhance user privacy and application security. These schemes are used for template protection of several biometric modalities, as fingerprints or face and the robustness is generally related to the hardness to recover the original biometric template by an impostor. In this paper, we propose to use genetic algorithms to approximate the original biometric feature and spoof the authentication system. We show through experimental results on fingerprints the efficiency of the proposed attack on the BioHashing algorithm, by approximating the original FingerCode, given the seed and the corresponding BioCode.

While biometrics is useful for secure and accurate identification of a person, it also has serious privacy implications in handling large databases of biometrics. Standard encryption techniques have limited use for handling biometrics templates and signals as intra-person variations can’t be handled effectively using information security techniques. As a way to enhance privacy and security of biometrics databases, we present a pattern recognition-based model to analyze the threats to a biometrics-based authentication system and also a novel solution to enhances privacy. Cancelable biometrics is an emerging concept, where transformations that hide the biometrics signatures (fingerprints, faces and iris) are designed so that the identity can be established with added security. Other methods have been proposed for enhancing privacy in biometrics. In this paper, we will describe our threat model for biometrics recognition and recent advances proposed for privacy enhancements for fingerprint and iris biometrics.

Biometric-based authentication systems are becoming the preferred choice to replace password-based authentication systems. Among several variations of biometrics (e.g., face, eye, fingerprint), iris-based authentication is commonly used in every day applications. In iris-based authentication systems, iris images from legitimate users are captured and certain features are extracted to be used for matching during the authentication process. Literature works suggest that iris-based authentication systems can be subject to presentation attacks where an attacker obtains printed copy of the victim’s eye image and displays it in front of an authentication system to gain unauthorized access. Such attacks can be performed by displaying static eye images on mobile devices or iPad (known as screen attacks). As iris features are not changed, once an iris feature is compromised, it is hard to avoid this type of attack. Existing approaches relying on static features of the iris are not suitable to prevent presentation attacks. Feature from live Iris (or liveness detection) is a promising approach. Further, additional layer of security from iris feature can enable hardening the security of authentication system that existing works do not address. To address these limitations, this chapter introduces iris signature generation based on the area between the pupil and the cornea. Our approach relies on capturing iris images using near infrared light. We train two classifiers to capture the area between the pupil and the cornea. The image of iris is then stored in the database. This approach generates a QR code from the iris. The code acts as a password (additional layer of security) and a user is required to provide it during authentication. The approach has been tested using samples obtained from publicly available iris database. The initial results show that the proposed approach has lower false positive and false negative rates.

The pivotal need to identify people requires efficient and robust schemes to guarantee high levels of personal information security. This paper introduces an encryption algorithm to generate cancelable face templates based on quantum image Hilbert permutation. The objective is to provide sufficient distortion of human facial biometrics to be stored in a database for authentication requirements through encryption. The strength of the proposed Cancelable Biometric (CB) scheme is guaranteed through the ability to generate cancelable face templates by performing the scrambling operation of the face biometrics after addition of a noise mask with a pre-specified variance and an initial seed. Generating the cancelable templates depends on a strategy with three basic steps: Initialization, Odd module, and Even module. Notably, the proposed scheme achieves high recognition rates based on the Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AROC) curve, with a value up to 99.51%. Furthermore, comparisons with the state-of-the-art schemes for cancelable face recognition are performed to validate the proposed scheme.

Biometric based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as compromise of the data will be permanent. Cancelable biometrics store a non-invertible transformed version of the biometric data. Thus, even if the storage is compromised, the biometric data remains safe. Cancelable biometrics also provide a higher level of privacy by allowing many templates for the same biometric data and hence non-linkability of user's data stored in different databases. In this paper, we propose an approach for cancelable fingerprint templates by using the idea of fuzzy vault. By integrating the fuzzy fingerprint vault with the existing password-based authentication system, we can use a different "long and random" password for each application, and the fuzzy fingerprint vault can be changed by simply changing the password.

A lightweight machine learning-based authentication framework for smart IoT devices

Invasion of user's privacy due to compromised biometric template draws great public concern recently. Cancelable biometric is proposed as a promising resolution by converting the original biometric template into a distorted version via a transformation function. However, certain schemes such as Densely Infinite-to-one mapping (DITOM) are merely applicable to fixed-length and ordered biometric features. This limits their application capacity on unordered and variable size features such as fingerprint minutia or descriptors. In this paper, we proposed an extended form of infinite-to-one transform that is capable to operate the two-dimensional feature vectors to generate a cancelable fingerprint template. The proposed method was evaluated using four public databases, i.e. FVC2002 DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4. Experimental results demonstrate satisfactory accuracy performance. Besides, the changeability and non-invertibility are also justified.

Cancelable biometrics is known as a template protection approach, and concrete protocols with high accuracy and efficiency have been proposed. Nevertheless, most known protocols, including the Hattori et al. protocol (Journal of Information Processing, 2012), pay little attention to security against the replay attack, which leads to severe authenticity violation in the remote authentication setting. In this paper, we revisit the Hattori et al. protocol based on the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption scheme, and propose a secure variant while keeping user-friendliness of the original protocol. Our protocol uses the revocation method of the original protocol in a proactive manner, i.e., in our protocol, the public key assigned to a user is randomly re-generated in every authentication process. We define a general and formal security game that covers the replay attack and considers fuzziness of biometric feature extraction, and show that our protocol is secure in that model. The computation and communication costs of our protocol are more efficient than those of similar protocols.