Fingerprint based authentication system using threshold visual cryptographic technique

Biometrics deals with automated method of identifying a person or verifying the identity of a person based on the physiological or behavioural characteristic, and so is used for authentication in many of the online transactions. The biometric that has been chosen for implementation is fingerprint, since fingerprint biometric is easily available and highly reliable compared to many other biometrics. In the existing biometric authentication system the fingerprint template of a person is stored as such in the authentication server and is prone to security attacks at the server side. To overcome this kind of server side attack, in the proposed system the fingerprint template is divided into two or more shares using visual cryptographic technique followed by compression. One of these shares is stored into the server and the remaining shares are given to the users. Only these two participants who possess these transparencies can reconstruct the secret (biometric template) by superimposition of shares. This kind of approach solves two major problems related to fingerprint based automatic access control systems such as falsification and costly maintenance of the large fingerprint database.