Cryptanalysis of Cancelable Biometrics Vault

Abstract

Cancelable Biometrics (CB) stands for a range of biometric transformation schemes combining biometrics with user specific tokens to generate secure templates. Required properties are the irreversibility, unlikability and recognition accuracy of templates while making their revocation possible. In biometrics, a key-binding scheme is used for protecting a cryptographic key using a biometric data. The key can be recomputed only if a correct biometric data is acquired during authentication. Applications of key-binding schemes are typically disk encryption, where the cryptographic key is used to encrypt and decrypt the disk. In this paper, we cryptanalyze a recent key-binding scheme, called Cancelable Biometrics Vault (CBV) based on cancelable biometrics. More precisely, the introduced cancelable transformation, called BioEncoding scheme, for instantiating the CBV framework is attacked in terms of reversibility and linkability of templates. Subsequently, our linkability attack enables to recover the key in the vault without additional assumptions. Our cryptanalysis introduces a new perspective by uncovering the CBV scheme’s revocability and linkability vulnerabilities, which were not previously identified in comparable biometric-based key-binding schemes.