Rolled versus plain fingerprints: Matching with cryptographic one-way hashes

Abstract

In password based authentication system, passwords are only stored and matched using cryptographic one-way hashes. Various biometrics have been utilized as an alternative authentication mechanism due to their permanent physical connections to a person. However, people have yet to see their usages in the formats of cryptographic one-way hashes for the reason that biometric templates cannot be reproduced with perfect accuracy and a tiny change in a template would significantly change its cryptographic hash value. In this paper we propose a novel approach of storing and matching fingerprint data with cryptographic one-way hashes. To our knowledge, it is the first proposal of matching biometric data using cryptographic one-way hashes. Experimental results with the NIST fingerprint database sd14v2 show the feasibility of our proposal.