Biometrics-Authenticated Key Exchange for Secure Messaging

Abstract

Secure messaging heavily relies on a session key negotiated by an Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocol. However, existing AKE protocols only verify the existence of a random secret key (corresponding to a certificated public key) stored in the terminal, rather than a legal user who uses the messaging application. In this paper, we propose a Biometrics-Authenticated Key Exchange (BAKE) framework, in which a secret key is derived from a user's biometric characteristics that are not necessary to be stored. To protect the privacy of users' biometric characteristics and realize one-round key exchange, we present an Asymmetric Fuzzy Encapsulation Mechanism (AFEM) to encapsulate messages with a public key derived from a biometric secret key, such that only a similar secret key can decapsulate them. To manifest the practicality, we present two AFEM constructions for two types of biometric secret keys and instantiate them with irises and fingerprints, respectively. We perform security analysis of BAKE and show its performance through extensive experiments.