Polynomial Vault: A Secure and Robust Fingerprint based Authentication

Fingerprint matching is one of the extensively used tools to authenticate users. It has been accepted by governments of various countries to authenticate their citizens. The common practice in a fingerprint based system is to store minutiae points of fingerprints as the user template. The minutiae points information can be accessed through an attack by an adversary and the original fingerprint of users can be obtained using this information. Unlike passwords, a compromised fingerprint is irreparable and there is a necessity to protect user data. In this paper, a technique called Polynomial Vault is proposed to secure fingerprint information. The fingerprint features and a unique user key-set are used to generate a secure template for a user by using a non-invertible transformation. This obtained template is used to authenticate the user. In case a user template is compromised, the proposed technique provides a way to construct a new template by changing the user key-set values. To demonstrate the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed technique, a thorough experimental analysis is being conducted using IIT Kanpur, FVC2004 (DB1 and DB2), FVC2002 (DB1, DB2, DB3, and DB4), and FVC2000 (DB1 and DB2) databases.