Investigation of Multimodal Template-Free Biometric Techniques and Associated Exception Handling

The Biometric systems are commonly used as a fundamental tool by both government and private sector organizations to allow restricted access to sensitive areas, to identify the criminals by the police and to authenticate the identification of individuals requesting to access to certain personal and confidential services. The applications of these identification tools have created issues of security and privacy relating to personal, commercial and government identities. Over the last decade, reports of increasing insecurity to the personal data of users in the public and commercial domain applications has prompted the development of more robust and sound measures to protect the personal data of users from being stolen and spoofing. The present study aimed to introduce the scheme for integrating direct and indirect biometric key generation schemes with the application of Shamir‘s secret sharing algorithm in order to address the two disadvantages: revocability of the biometric key and the exception handling of biometric modality. This study used two different approaches for key generation using Shamir‘s secret sharing scheme: template based approach for indirect key generation and template-free. The findings of this study demonstrated that the encryption key generated by the proposed system was not required to be stored in the database which prevented the attack on the privacy of the data of the individuals from the hackers. Interestingly, the proposed system was also able to generate multiple encryption keys with varying lengths. Furthermore, the results of this study also offered the flexibility of providing the multiple keys for different applications for each user. The results from this study, consequently, showed the considerable potential and prospect of the proposed scheme to generate encryption keys directly and indirectly from the biometric samples, which could enhance its success in biometric security field.