An embedded biometric sensor for ubiquitous authentication

Communication networks and distributed technologies move people towards the era of ubiquitous computing. An ubiquitous environment needs many authentication sensors for users recognition, in order to provide a secure infrastructure for both user access to resources and services and information management. Today the security requirements must ensure secure and trusted user information to protect sensitive data resource access and they could be used for user traceability inside the platform. Conventional authentication systems, based on username and password, are in crisis since they are not able to guarantee a suitable security level for several applications. Biometric authentication systems represent a valid alternative to the conventional authentication systems providing a flexible e-infrastructure towards an integrated solution supporting the requirement for improved inter-organizational functionality. In this work the study and the implementation of a fingerprints-based embedded biometric system is proposed. Typical strategies implemented in Identity Management Systems could be useful to protect biometric information. The proposed sensor can be seen as a self-contained sensor: it performs the all elaboration steps on board, a necessary requisite to strengthen security, so that sensible data are securely managed and stored inside the sensor, without any data leaking out. The sensor has been prototyped via an FPGA-based platform achieving fast execution time and a good final throughput. Resources used, elaboration times of the sensor are reported. Finally, recognition rates of the proposed embedded biometric sensor have been evaluated considering three different databases: the FVC2002 reference database, the CSAI/Biometrika proprietary database, and the CSAI/Secugen proprietary database. The best achieved FAR and FRR indexes are respectively 1.07% and 8.33%, with an elaboration time of 183.32 ms and a working frequency of 22.5 MHz.