Robustness analysis of likelihood ratio score fusion rule for multimodal biometric systems under spoof attacks

Recent works have shown that, contrary to a common belief, multi-modal biometric systems may be “forced” by an impostor by submitting a spoofed biometric replica of a genuine user to only one of the matchers. Although those results were obtained under a worst-case scenario when the attacker is able to replicate the exact appearance of the true biometric, this raises the issue of investigating more thoroughly the robustness of multi-modal systems against spoof attacks and devising new methods to design robust systems against them. To this aim, in this paper we propose a robustness evaluation method which takes into account also scenarios more realistic than the worst-case one. Our method is based on an analytical model of the score distribution of fake traits, which is assumed to lie between the one of genuine and impostor scores, and is parametrised by a measure of the relative distance to the distribution of impostor scores, we name “fake strength”. Varying the value of such parameter allows one to simulate the different factors which can affect the distribution of fake scores, like the ability of the attacker to replicate a certain biometric. Preliminary experimental results on real bi-modal biometric data sets made up of faces and fingerprints show that the widely used LLR rule can be highly vulnerable to spoof attacks against one only matcher, even when the attack has a low fake strength.