Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

Evaluation of candidate fingerprint features for employment within template-free biometric cryptosystems

Harmer, Karl (2009) Evaluation of candidate fingerprint features for employment within template-free biometric cryptosystems. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.94400) (KAR id:94400)

Abstract

With the increasing employment of biometric authentication worldwide, there have been significant concerns over the security and privacy of the biometric templates, which are stored and used for matching. This thesis investigates a relatively new area of biometric authentication, known as biometric encryption. Biometric encryption is an alternative form of authentication where an encryption key is either generated, or retrieved, instead of a binary result indicating verification. The key can subsequently be used to encrypt and decrypt data using existing encryption algorithms, such as triple-DES, AES and RSA. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the feasibility of generating stable and strong encryption keys directly from biometric features, without the use of templates. To accomplish this, a proof-of-concept was created using the fingerprint biometric modality. Fingerprints currently possess a limited range of features, although they are highly variable and result in many user distributions overlapping. Therefore, if consistent, highly entropic keys can be generated using fingerprint features, other modalities, whose feature distributions are better behaved, should improve the performance of the generated key. By performing statistical tests, on the countless variants of existing and novel feature vectors, the best performing feature vectors were then selected for deployment in a template-free biometric encryption system. Although the results were not exceptional, an encryption key, with 21 effective bits, was reproduced correctly -80% of the time with 55% unique keys in the resultant key-space. These results are encouraging, although significant improvements would be necessary in order to obtain the performance required of a practical system.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy (PhD))
DOI/Identification number: 10.22024/UniKent/01.02.94400
Additional information: This thesis has been digitised by EThOS, the British Library digitisation service, for purposes of preservation and dissemination. It was uploaded to KAR on 25 April 2022 in order to hold its content and record within University of Kent systems. It is available Open Access using a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivatives (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) licence so that the thesis and its author, can benefit from opportunities for increased readership and citation. This was done in line with University of Kent policies (https://www.kent.ac.uk/is/strategy/docs/Kent%20Open%20Access%20policy.pdf). If you feel that your rights are compromised by open access to this thesis, or if you would like more information about its availability, please contact us at ResearchSupport@kent.ac.uk and we will seriously consider your claim under the terms of our Take-Down Policy (https://www.kent.ac.uk/is/regulations/library/kar-take-down-policy.html).
Uncontrolled keywords: Electronic engineering; biometrics
Subjects: T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Engineering and Digital Arts
SWORD Depositor: SWORD Copy
Depositing User: SWORD Copy
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2023 15:09 UTC
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2023 15:10 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/94400 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.