Abstract-Secure storage of biometric templates has become an increasingly important issue in biometric authentication systems. We study how secure sketch, a recently proposed errortolerant cryptographic primitive, can be applied to protect the templates. We identify several practical issues that are not addressed in the existing theoretical framework, and show the subtleties in evaluating the security of practical systems. We propose a general framework to design and analyze secure sketch for biometric templates, and give a concrete construction for face biometrics as an example. We show that theoretical bounds have their limitations in practical schemes, and the exact security of the system often needs more careful investigations. We further discuss how to use secure sketch in the design of multi-factor authentication systems that allow easy revocation of user credentials.

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We present an information-theoretically secure biometric storage system using graph-based error correcting codes in a Slepian-Wolf coding framework. Our architecture is motivated by the noisy nature of personal biometrics and the requirement to provide security without storing the true biometric at the device. The principal difficulty is that real biometric signals, such as fingerprints, do not obey the i.i.d. or ergodic statistics that are required for the underlying typicality properties in the Slepian-Wolf coding framework. To meet this challenge, we propose to transform the biometric data into binary feature vectors that are i.i.d. Bernoulli (0.5), independent across different users, and related within the same user through a BSC-p channel with small p less-than 0.5. Since this is a standard channel model for LDPC codes, the feature vectors are now suitable for LDPC syndrome coding. The syndromes serve as secure biometrics for access control. Experiments on a fingerprint database demonstrate that the system is information-theoretically secure, and achieves very low false accept rates and low reject rates. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2008This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Abstract-We present an information-theoretically secure biometric storage system using graph-based error correcting codes in a Slepian-Wolf coding framework. Our architecture is motivated by the noisy nature of personal biometrics and the requirement to provide security without storing the true biometric at the device. The principal difficulty is that real biometric signals, such as fingerprints, do not obey the i.i.d. or ergodic statistics that are required for the underlying typicality properties in the SlepianWolf coding framework. To meet this challenge, we propose to transform the biometric data into binary feature vectors that are i.i.d. Bernoulli(0.5), independent across different users, and related within the same user through a BSC-p channel with small p < 0.5. Since this is a standard channel model for LDPC codes, the feature vectors are now suitable for LDPC syndrome coding. The syndromes serve as secure biometrics for access control. Experiments on a fingerprint database demonstrate that the system is information-theoretically secure, and achieves very low false accept rates and low false reject rates.

There have been active discussions on how to derive a consistent cryptographic key from noisy data such as biometric templates, with the help of some extra information called a sketch. It is desirable that the sketch reveals little information about the biometric templates even in the worst case (i.e., the entropy loss should be low). The main difficulty is that many biometric templates are represented as points in continuous domains with unknown distributions, whereas known results either work only in discrete domains, or lack rigorous analysis on the entropy loss. A general approach to handle points in continuous domains is to quantize (discretize) the points and apply a known sketch scheme in the discrete domain. However, it can be difficult to analyze the entropy loss due to quantization and to find the "optimal" quantizer. In this paper, instead of trying to solve these problems directly, we propose to examine the relative entropy loss of any given scheme, which bounds the number of additional bits we could have extracted if we used the optimal parameters. We give a general scheme and show that the relative entropy loss due to suboptimal discretization is at most (n log 3), where n is the number of points, and the bound is tight. We further illustrate how our scheme can be applied to real biometric data by giving a concrete scheme for face biometrics.

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In [1], a novel method for identifying the source camera of a digital image is proposed. The method is based on first extracting imaging sensor's pattern noise from many images and later verifying its presence in a given image through a correlative procedure. In this paper, we investigate the performance of this method in a more realistic setting and provide results concerning its detection performance. To improve the applicability of the method as a forensic tool, we propose an enhancement over it by also verifying that class properties of the image in question are in agreement with those of the camera. For this purpose, we identify and compare characteristics due to demosaicing operation. Our results show that the enhanced method offers a significant improvement in the performance.

Being able to measure the actual information content of biometrics is very important but also a challenging problem. Main difficulty here is not only related to the selected feature representation of the biometric data, but also related to the matching algorithm employed in biometric systems. In this paper, we propose a new measure for measuring biometric information using relative entropy between intra-user and interuser distance distributions. As an example, we evaluated the proposed measure on a face image dataset.