Efficient and Privacy-Enhancing Non-Interactive Periocular Authentication for Access Control Services

Periocular authentication has emerged as an increasingly prominent approach in access control services, especially in situations of face occlusion. However, its limited feature area and low information complexity make it susceptible to tampering and identity forgery. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a practical privacy-enhancing non-interactive periocular authentication scheme for access control services. It enables encrypted cosine similarity matching on an untrusted remote authentication server by leveraging random masking (RM) and dual-trapdoor homomorphic encryption (DTHE). Additionally, a weight control matrix is introduced to enhance authentication accuracy by assigning importance to different feature dimensions. To accommodate devices with varying trust levels, we employ adaptive authentication strategies. For trusted mobile devices, we implement secure single-factor authentication based on periocular features, while for external devices with unknown security status, we enforce a two-factor authentication mechanism integrating periocular features with tokens to mitigate unauthorized access risks. Additionally, our scheme conceals users’ true identities from external devices during authentication. Security analysis demonstrates that our solution effectively mitigates tampering and replay attacks in the network while preventing privacy leakage. As validated by experimental results, the proposed scheme enables efficient authentication of obscured faces.