Biometrics and Privacy-Preservation: How Do They Evolve?

The emerging field of privacy-preserving biometrics is attracting significant attention, as a paradigm that can address several of the key concerns in cryptographic authentication processes, whilst simultaneously addressing the issues of privacy. This paper contributes to the understanding of the field from following perspectives: (1) It proposes a novel and comprehensive taxonomy of privacy-preserving biometrics for the classification of the knowledge/existing literature in the field. (2) It provides a taxonomy-guided literature survey. (3) Open research problems/future works are discussed. (4) As the techniques used in privacy-preserving biometric authentication systems rely upon, or integrate with, general biometric matching techniques, a taxonomy and summary of the state-of-art biometrics matching techniques has also been developed. Such system-level knowledge organization will help produce excellent self-contained contents of reference materials for researchers in both the biometrics community and cryptography community who would otherwise have difficulty in understanding the relevant materials from the other community.