A novel system for fingerprint privacy protection1

This paper proposes a novel system for protecting the fingerprint privacy without using a token or key. In the enrollment, two fingerprints are captured from two of an user's fingers. We extract the minutiae positions from one fingerprint, the orientation from the other fingerprint and the primary cores from both fingerprints. Based on these extracted information, a combined minutiae template is generated and stored in a database. In the authentication, the user needs to provide two query fingerprints from the same two fingers which are used in the enrollment. By storing the combined minutiae template, the complete minutiae feature of a single fingerprint will not be compromised when the database is stolen. Furthermore, because of the similarity in topology, it is also difficult for the attacker to distinguish our template from the minutiae of an original fingerprint. We evaluate the performance of our system over the FVC2002 DB2_A database. The results show that the False Rejection Rate of our system is 3% when the False Acceptance Rate is 0.01%.