Preventing the cross-matching attack in Bloom filter-based cancelable biometrics

Abstract

Deployments of biometric technologies are already widely disseminated, i.e. the protection of biometric reference data becomes vital in order to safeguard individuals' privacy. Biometric template protection techniques are designed to protect biometric templates in an irreversible and unlinkable manner (ISO/IEC IS 24745). In addition, these schemes are required to maintain key system properties, e.g. biometric performance or authentication speed. Recently, template protection schemes based on Bloom filters have been introduced and applied to various biometric characteristics, such as iris or face. While a Bloom filter-based representation of biometric templates is irreversible the originally proposed system has been exposed to be vulnerable to cross-matching attacks. In this paper we address this issue and demonstrate that any kind of Bloom filter-based representation of biometric templates can be transformed to an unordered set of integer values which enables a locking of irreversible templates in a fuzzy vault scheme from Dodis et al. which can be secured against known cross-matching attacks. In addition, experiments which are carried out on a publicly available iris database, show that the proposed scheme retains the biometric performance of the original system.