BioCanCrypto: An LDPC Coded Bio-Cryptosystem on Fingerprint Cancellable Template

Biometrics as a means of personal authentication has demonstrated strong viability in the past decade. However, directly deriving a unique cryptographic key from biometric data is a non-trivial task due to the fact that biometric data is usually noisy and presents large intra-class variations. Moreover, biometric data is permanently associated with the user, which leads to security and privacy issues. Cancellable biometrics and bio-cryptosystem are two main branches to address those issues, yet both approaches fall short in terms of accuracy performance, security, and privacy. In this paper, we propose a Bio-Crypto system on fingerprint Cancellable template (Bio-CanCrypto), which bridges cancellable biometrics and bio-cryptosystem to achieve a middle-ground for alleviating the limitations of both. Specifically, a cancellable transformation is applied on a fixed-length fingerprint feature vector to generate cancellable templates. Next, an LDPC coding mechanism is introduced into a reusable fuzzy extractor scheme and used to extract the stable cryptographic key from the generated cancellable templates. The proposed system can achieve both cancellability and reusability in one scheme. Experiments are conducted on a public fingerprint dataset, i.e., FVC2002. The results demonstrate that the proposed LDPC coded reusable fuzzy extractor is effective and promising.