A hybrid biometric cryptosystem for securing fingerprint minutiae templates

Security concerns regarding the stored biometric data is impeding the widespread public acceptance of biometric technology. Though a number of bio-crypto algorithms have been proposed, they have limited practical applicability due to the trade-off between recognition performance and security of the template. In this paper, we improve the recognition performance as well as the security of a fingerprint based biometric cryptosystem, called fingerprint fuzzy vault. We incorporate minutiae descriptors, which capture ridge orientation and frequency information in a minutia's neighborhood, in the vault construction using the fuzzy commitment approach. Experimental results show that with the use of minutiae descriptors, the fingerprint matching performance improves from an FAR of 0.7% to 0.01% at a GAR of 95% with some improvement in security as well. An analysis of security while considering two different attack scenarios is also presented. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2008 and was selected as the Best Scientific Paper in the biometrics track.