Contact-Less Palmprint Biometric for Securing DSP Coprocessors Used in CE Systems

This paper presents a novel contact-less palmprint biometric hardware security approach for securing DSP based coprocessors. The proposed approach is capable of generating secret biometric palmprint constraints that are embedded in DSP designs used in consumer electronics systems to detect counterfeited versions. Any DSP based intellectual property (IP) core can be embedded with proposed palmprint signature to distinguish between authentic and its fake versions. In the proposed approach, the authentic biometric palmprint is first converted into its equivalent palmprint signature representing digital template based on palmprint feature set, followed by embedding palmprint signature’s digital template into the design in the form of secret biometric constraints. The biometric palmprint constraints generated through the proposed approach is non-replicable and non-vulnerable compared to other signature based scheme such as hardware steganography and hardware watermarking. The proposed approach exploits several security features such as: palmprint nodal points, palmprint features, palmprint feature ordering, concatenation mechanism of features etc to generate a robust palmprint hardware security constraint. The results of the proposed approach indicated stronger probability of co-incidence and stronger tamper tolerance ability than recent related works.