• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.10
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• pp.1783-1798
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• 2011

Recently, a cryptographic construct, called fuzzy vault, has been proposed for crypto-biometric systems, and some implementations for fingerprint have been reported to protect the stored fingerprint template by hiding the fingerprint features. In this paper, we implement the fuzzy fingerprint vault, combining fingerprint verification and fuzzy vault scheme to protect fingerprint templates. To implement the fuzzy fingerprint vault as a complete system, we have to consider several practical issues such as automatic fingerprint alignment, verification accuracy, execution time, error correcting code, etc. In addition, to protect the fuzzy fingerprint vault from the correlation attack, we propose an approach to insert chaffs in a structured way such that distinguishing the fingerprint minutiae and the chaff points obtained from two applications is computationally hard. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach provides higher security than inserting chaffs randomly without a significant degradation of the verification accuracy, and our implementation can be used for real applications.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.5674-5691
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• 2016

Fast IDentity Online(FIDO) supports biometric authentications in an online environment without transmitting biometric templates over the network. For a given FIDO client, the "Fuzzy Vault" securely stores biometric templates, houses additional biometric templates, and unlocks private keys via biometrics. The Fuzzy Vault has been extensively researched and some vulnerabilities have been discovered, such as brute force, correlation, and key inversions attacks. In this paper, we propose a simple fingerprint Fuzzy Vault for FIDO clients. By using the FIDO feature, a simple minutiae alignment, and point-to-point matching, our Fuzzy Vault provides a secure algorithm to combat a variety of attacks, such as brute force, correlation, and key inversions. Using a case study, we verified our Fuzzy Vault by using a publicly available fingerprint database. The results of our experiments show that the Genuine Acceptance Rate and the False Acceptance Rate range from 48.89% to 80% and from 0.02% to 0%, respectively. In addition, our Fuzzy Vault, compared to existing similar technologies, needed fewer attempts.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.11
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• pp.2221-2234
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• 2011

The fuzzy vault scheme has emerged as a promising solution to user privacy and fingerprint template security problems. Recently, however, the fuzzy vault scheme has been shown to be susceptible to a correlation attack. This paper proposes a novel scheme for one-time templates for fingerprint authentication based on the fuzzy vault scheme. As in one-time passwords, the suggested method changes templates after each completion of authentication, and thus the compromised templates cannot be reused. Furthermore, a huge number of chaff minutiae can be added by expanding the size of the fingerprint image. Therefore, the proposed method can protect a user's fingerprint minutiae against the correlation attack. In our experiments, the proposed approach can improve the security level of a typical approach against brute-force attack by the factor of $10^{34}$.

• Proceedings of the Korea Institutes of Information Security and Cryptology Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.123-132
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• 2006

Biometric-based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as the compromise of the data will be permanent. To protect the biometric data, we need to store it in a non-invertible transformed version. Thus, even if the transformed version is compromised, the actual biometric data remains safe. In this paper, we propose an approach to protect finger-print templates by using the idea of the fuzzy vault. Fuzzy vault is a recently developed cryptographic construct to secure critical data with the fingerprint data in a way that only the authorized user can access the secret by providing the valid fingerprint. We modify the fuzzy vault to protect fingerprint templates and to perform fingerprint verification with the protected template at the same time. This is challenging because the fingerprint verification is performed in the domain of the protected form. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach can perform the fingerprint verification with the protected template.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.286-292
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• 2011

Biometrics systems are used in a wide range of areas, including the area of crime prevention, due to their unique characteristics. However, serious problems can occur if biometric information is disclosed to an unauthorized user. To address these issues, this paper proposes a real valued fuzzy vault method, which adopts a real number error correction code to implement a fuzzy vault scheme for protecting fingerprint temples. The proposed method provides the benefit of allowing the private key value to be changed at any time, unlike biometric template such as a fingerprint, which is not easily renewable even if its security has been breached. The validity of the proposed method is verified for fingerprint verification.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.15-21
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• 2010

The user authentication using fingerprint information not only provides the convenience but also high security. However, the fingerprint information for user authentication can cause serious problems when it has been compromised. It cannot change like passwords, because the user only has ten fingers on two hands. Recently, there is an increasing research of the fuzzy fingerprint vault system to protect fingerprint information. The research on the problem of fingerprint alignment using geometric hashing technique carried out. This paper proposes the hardware architecture fuzzy fingerprint vault system based on geometric hashing. The proposed architecture consists of software and hardware module. The hardware module has charge of matching between enrollment hash table and verification hash table. Based on the experimental results, the execution time of the proposed system with 36 real minutiae is 0.2 second when 100 chaff minutiae, 0.53 second when 400 chaff minutiae.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.419-426
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• 2015

This paper proposes a fingerprint verification system on a fuzzy vault with steganography for a smartphone. While biometric-based authentication can provide strong security, the biometric data must be handled carefully as it cannot be re-enrolled when it is revealed to other people. When the transformed data is used for authentication, the original biometric data can be protected. In this paper, we combine a fingerprint verification system with a fuzzy vault scheme to protect the fingerprint data of a smartphone user. In addition, the transformed data using a fuzzy vault scheme increases the security as it is concealed by the steganography scheme. The result of the experiment using fingerprint databases shows that the proposed scheme provides a high level of convenience and security for authentication of a smartphone having with a fingerprint sensor.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.13-25
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• 2011

Biometric-based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as the compromise of the data will be permanent. The fuzzy fingerprint vault system is one of the most popular solutions for protecting the fingerprint template stored in the database. Recently, however, this system is very susceptible to a correlation attack that finds the real minutiae using multiple fingerprint vaults enrolled for different applications. To solve this problem, we propose a robust fuzzy fingerprint vault system against the correlation attack. In this paper, we add chaff minutiae based on the relative information of minutiae such as direction, coordinate instead of adding randomly. Also, our proposed approach allow to add multiple chaff minutiae within tolerance box for enhanced security level. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can protect the correlation attack and achieve enhanced verification accuracy.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.1294-1310
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• 2010

User authentication using fingerprint information provides convenience as well as strong security. However, serious problems may occur if fingerprint information stored for user authentication is used illegally by a different person since it cannot be changed freely as a password due to a limited number of fingers. Recently, research in fuzzy fingerprint vault system has been carried out actively to safely protect fingerprint information in a fingerprint authentication system. In addition, research to solve the fingerprint alignment problem by applying a geometric hashing technique has also been carried out. In this paper, we propose the hardware architecture for a geometric hashing based fuzzy fingerprint vault system that consists of the software module and hardware module. The hardware module performs the matching for the transformed minutiae in the enrollment hash table and verification hash table. On the other hand, the software module is responsible for hardware feature extraction. We also propose the hardware architecture which parallel processing technique is applied for high speed processing. Based on the experimental results, we confirmed that execution time for the proposed hardware architecture was 0.24 second when number of real minutiae was 36 and number of chaff minutiae was 200, whereas that of the software solution was 1.13 second. For the same condition, execution time of the hardware architecture which parallel processing technique was applied was 0.01 second. Note that the proposed hardware architecture can achieve a speed-up of close to 100 times compared to a software based solution.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.63-70
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• 2009

Recently, in the security token based authentication system, there is an increasing trend of using fingerprint for the token holder verification, instead of passwords. However, the security of the fingerprint data is particularly important as the possible compromise of the data will be permanent. In this paper, we propose an approach for secure fingerprint verification by distributing both the secret and the computation based on the fuzzy vault(a cryptographic construct which has been proposed for crypto-biometric systems). That is, a user fingerprint template which is applied to the fuzzy vault is divided into two parts, and each part is stored into a security token and a server, respectively. At distributing the fingerprint template, we consider both the security level and the verification accuracy. Then, the geometric hashing technique is applied to solve the fingerprint alignment problem, and this computation is also distributed over the combination of the security token and the server in the form of the challenge-response. Finally, the polynomial can be reconstructed from the accumulated real points from both the security token and the server. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that our proposed approach can perform the fuzzy vault-based fingerprint verification more securely on a combination of a security token and a server without significant degradation of the verification accuracy.