Secure Fingerprint Authentication with Homomorphic Encryption

Biometric-based authentication has come into recent prevalence in competition to traditional password- and/or token-based authentication in many applications, both for user convenience and the stability/uniqueness of biometric traits. However, biometric template data, uniquely linking to a user's identity, are considered to be sensitive information. Therefore, it should be secured to prevent privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose a homomorphic encryption-based fingerprint authentication system to provide access control, while protecting sensitive biometric template data. Using homomorphic encryption, matching of biometric data can be performed in the encrypted domain, increasing the difficulty for attackers to obtain the original biometric template without knowing the private key. Moreover, the trade-off between the computational overload and authentication accuracy is studied and experimentally verified on a publicly available fingerprint database, FVC2002 DB2.