Biometric-Based Security System for Plaintext e-Mail Messages

Biometric recognition systems offer greater security and are more convenient than traditional methods of personal recognition. At the same time, the security of the biometric system itself has become more and more important. Of these, the fingerprints are one the most widely used form of biometric identification. In this paper, the commercially-used encryption/decryption algorithm such as AES with key of 256-bit is adopted and improved by adding a new security level based on the user's biometric features. In addition to the AES, the proposed algorithm which involves XOR, message reverse and the thumbprint features allows for programmable security levels. The proposed system prototype is tested experimentally using the simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) on the Gmail server. Time complexity of the proposed encryption/decryption algorithm is also experimentally investigated. The obtained results showed that the proposed algorithm gives more efficient results when compared with a previously reported equivalent message security technique/algorithm.