Title: Approach to cryptographic key generation from fingerprint biometrics

Authors: Subhas Barman; Debasis Samanta; Samiran Chattopadhyay

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College, Jalpaiguri-735102, West Bengal, India ' School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur-721302, West Bengal, India ' Department of Information Technology, Jadavpur University, Salt Lake Campus, LB – 8, Salt Lake, Kolkata – 700 098, India

Abstract: In crypto-biometric system (CBS), biometric is combined with cryptography. In CBS, either accessing a cryptographic key is controlled with biometric or the key is generated from biometric features. This work is related to the latter approach in CBS. In such a system, protecting the privacy of the biometric data is an important concern. Further, there is a need to generate different cryptographic keys from the same biometric template of a user. Cancellable transformation of biometric data prior to the key generation is known as a solution. In this paper, we propose an approach to generate cryptographic key from cancellable fingerprint templates (C_T) of sender and receiver to ensure the privacy of the fingerprints and at the same time, it produces revocable key for the application of symmetric cryptography. The between-person variability of C_Ts guarantees the randomness which ensures that impostor users are not able to generate a genuine C_T to break the cryptographic key.

Keywords: cryptographic key generation; fingerprint recognition; fingerprints; cancellable template; network security; crypto-biometric systems; symmetric cryptography; biometrics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2015.071946

International Journal of Biometrics, 2015 Vol.7 No.3, pp.226 - 248

Accepted: 16 Jun 2015
Published online: 24 Sep 2015 *

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