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 on the fingerprint recognition belong, without question, to the most familiar ones. Fingerprints have been used for identification and authentication for a long time because their uniqueness and reliability have been proven in everyday life. Nowadays, there are a great number of such biometric systems based on fingerprint recognition on the market. One group of them is used for forensic purposes (these are called dactyloscopic systems and are used in tasks of person identification). Another group of biometric systems represents the topic 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. If we try to combine a biometric (fingerprint) system with some cryptographic system, we are confronted with the question, if there is enough information entropy in the fingerprint. Some computations of the similarity among fingerprints have already been published but they have considered the matching of fingerprints. For cryptographic tasks, it is more important to exploit the information strength hidden in fingerprint papillary line structures. The answer to this question can be found in the third chapter. Finally, if the information strength is adequate to the cryptographic requirements, we can design a system, which uses fingerprint technology as a biometric information input and offers biometric keys to the cryptographic subsystem. The detailed description of such Biometric Security System can be found in the fourth chapter, where all processes needed for the computations and processing are described. The Biometric Security System was implemented and appropriate modules were tested. The test analyses and reports are presented in the last, fifth, chapter.