Iris based authentication mechanism for e-Passports

Abstract

E-Passports are widely issued all over the world, although they suffer from security flaws. Many guidelines were proposed to solve these security considerations, like the guideline of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Extended Access Control (EAC), and other solutions for the third e-Passport generation. In this paper, an iris based authentication mechanism for e-Passport is proposed and validated. This mechanism is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The iris based cryptographic key regeneration scheme is used to obtain a stable input from biometric data which is used to generate the security parameters of the elliptic curve. Another important aspect of this work is that it is evaluated on a publicly available biometric database. The results show a good performance especially from a biometric point of view (False Acceptance Rate of 0.2% and False Rejection Rate of 3.6%) on a subset of the NIST-ICE database.