On the feasibility of creating morphed iris-codes

Morphing techniques can be used to create artificial biometric samples, which resemble the biometric information of two (or more) individuals in image and feature domain. If morphed biometric images or templates are infiltrated to a biometric recognition system the subjects contributing to the morphed image will both (or all) be successfully verified against a single enrolled template. Hence, the unique link between individuals and their biometric reference data is annulled. The vulnerability of face and fingerprint recognition systems to such morphing attacks has been assessed in the recent past. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of morphing iris-codes. Two relevant attack scenarios are discussed and a scheme for morphing pairs of iris-codes depending on the expected stability of their bits is proposed. Different iris recognition systems, which accept comparison scores at a recommended Hamming distance of 0.32, are shown to be vulnerable to attacks based on the presented morphing technique.