Smartcard-Based Secret Sharing for Secure Fingerprint Verification

Recently, in the smartcard-based authentication system, there is an increasing trend of using fingerprint for the card holder verification, instead of passwords. However, the security of the fingerprint data is particularly important as the possible compromise of the data will be permanent. To protect the fingerprint data, techniques such as "fuzzy vault" which is based on the difficulty of the polynomial reconstruction need to be developed for the smartcard-based environment. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient approach which reconstructs a polynomial on a smartcard with the aid of a server by using fuzzy fingerprint vault distributed into the smartcard and the server. Based on the experimental results, we confirmed that our secret sharingbased approach can perform the fuzzy vault-based fingerprint verification more securely (by a factor of'300) and quickly (by a factor of 17) on a combination of a smartcard and a server.