Voice Biometric Authentication for Enhancing Internet Service Security

Although many customer-oriented Internet applications, such as Web-banking or e-commerce, are being widely used, an increased security level is required. An efficient means to this end is by authenticating users through biometric methods. In this work, the architecture of an Internet application deploying voice biometric authentication is presented. Among the existing biometric methods, voice biometrics can be an affordable and accurate authentication technology that has been already successfully employed in telephony services. According to the proposed architecture, a transaction-based Internet application should be complemented by a biometric server where customer's unique set of speech models (voiceprint) is stored. The authentication procedure requests from the user to pronounce a random sequence of digits and after capturing speech and extracting voice features at the client side are sent back to the biometric server. The biometric server decides whether the received features match the stored voiceprint of the customer who claims to be, and accordingly grants authentication. By implementing the proposed architecture, Internet applications are provided by a higher degree of certainty regarding the identity of a customer, and prevented from fraudulent transactions