FinCaT: Fingerprint Cancellable Template Protection Remediation Schemes, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent years have revealed a rapid expansion in the use of various biometric technologies for authentication management systems. Although biometric systems have innumerable merits over conventional token-based and knowledge-based identification systems like ID cards or passwords, but they are still susceptible to diverse security threats. Among all, the attack on the biometric template database is the most crucial and adverse attack. If the user templates are jeopardized at any level of biometric system, then they cannot be further used for security mechanism. Henceforth, it is requisite to provide privacy and security to biometric template data by modifying these through revocable and non-invertible transformations to acquire cancellable biometric templates. The cancellable biometrics offers promising remedies for biometric template protection. Our work aims to expound a detailed review of state-of-the-art transformation-based fingerprint template protection schemes. Additionally, the paper discusses various publicly available benchmark datasets. We also deliberate the research challenges emerging from this study, which requires to be addressed in this rapidly evolving field of research. The selection of a suitable function for transformation process is still a major open challenging task, so that the results obtained after applying the function does not result in cross-matching of the templates in the database.