Cryptographic Key Generation from Multiple Biometric Modalities: Fusing Minutiae with Iris Feature

Abstract

Human users find difficult to remember long cryptographic keys. Therefore, researchers, for a long time period, have been investigating ways to use biometric features of the user rather than memorable password or passphrase, in an attempt to produce tough and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our goal is to integrate the volatility of the user's biometric features into the generated key, so as to construct the key unpredictable to a hacker who is deficient of important knowledge about the user's biometrics. In our earlier research, we have incorporated multiple biometric modalities into the cryptographic key generation to provide better security. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generating a secure cryptographic key, where the security is further enhanced with the difficulty of factoring large numbers. At first, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Then, the extracted features are fused at the feature level to obtain the multi-biometric template. Finally, a multi-biometric template is used for generating a 256-bit cryptographic key. For experimentation, we have used the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results have showed that the generated 256-bit cryptographic key is capable of providing better user authentication and better security.

Dorsal Hand Vein Identification Based on Binary Particle Swarm Optimization

“…The information about the database that we used were acquired from the NCUT Database [52]. The information about the database used are summarized in Table 2.…”

Multi-Biometric Template Protection: Issues and Challenges

“…Several other ideas of using a set of multiple biometric characteristics within biometric template protections schemes have been proposed [46][47][48][49][50][51]. That is, a rearrangement of biometric feature vectors in order to provide a uniform distribution of errors improves the overall accuracy of the system.…”

Fingerprint-based crypto-biometric system for network security

“…In [16,32], face biometric is used to extract a suitable length cryptographic key. Iris is also used for cryptographic key generation from iris texture [12,13,31]. Rathgeb et al [31] analyze the iris feature vector and detected the most stable or reliable bits in the binary iris code to construct cryptographic key.…”

“…In recent research, multimodal or multiple biometrics are used in crypto-biometric systems [11][12][13]. A Jagadeesan et al proposed a method [12] where multimodal biometrics (fingerprint and iris) are used.…”

“…Many researchers are trying to use biometric traits in the authentication component of cryptography to remove the requirement of password-based authentication. The integration of biometric with cryptography, deals with either cryptographic key release [8][9][10] or cryptographic key generation [6,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17], is promising in many aspects. As biometric is directly linked with the owner, it removes the problem to memorize the cryptographic key and confirms the non-repudiation of users.…”