Biometric Cryptography Based on Fingerprints

biometrics, cryptography, verification, authentication, identification,fingerprint, enrollment, matching, classification, orientation field,ridge count, biometric template, biometric key, certificate, entropy,error rate, PIN, password

General biometric systems are well known in public and systems based onthe fingerprint recognition belong, without question, to the mostfamiliar ones. Fingerprints have been used for identification andauthentication for a long time because their uniqueness and reliabilityhave been proven in everyday life. Nowadays, there are a great numberof such biometric systems based on fingerprint recognition on themarket. One group of them is used for forensic purposes (these arecalled dactyloscopic systems and are used in tasks of personidentification). Another group of biometric systems represents thetopic of interest of this monography - access or verification systems.
Both such systems and related basic biometric terms and processes are described in the first and second chapters.
Ifwe try to combine a biometric (fingerprint) system with somecryptographic system, we are confronted with the question, if there isenough information entropy in the fingerprint. Some computations of thesimilarity among fingerprints have already been published but they haveconsidered the matching of fingerprints. For cryptographic tasks, it ismore important to exploit the information strength hidden infingerprint papillary line structures. The answer to this question canbe found in the third chapter.
Finally, if the information strengthis adequate to the cryptographic requirements, we can design a system,which uses fingerprint technology as a biometric information input andoffers biometric keys to the cryptographic subsystem. The detaileddescription of such Biometric Security System can be found in thefourth chapter, where all processes needed for the computations andprocessing are described. The Biometric Security System was implementedand appropriate modules were tested. The test analyses and reports arepresented in the last, fifth, chapter.