Methods of reducing bio-cryptographic algorithms computational complexity

Traditional biometric systems have always been regarded with skepticism, due to the uniqueness and universality features of human biometrics once stolen or compromised, they cannot be safely replaced. For this reason, common efforts of Cryptography and biometric systems researchers gave birth to Bio-cryptography, a domain which proposes to overcome the main security issues associated with biometrics usage, by generating or securing existing cryptographic keys, using biometric data. The main advantages brought by Bio-cryptography are represented by eliminating the need for storing biometric templates and the flexibility of resulted bio-cryptograms. On the other hand, one major drawback concerning bio-cryptographic algorithms is their high consumption of computational resources, caused by the various mathematical processing and large amounts of data used. This paper proposes two methods of reducing bio-cryptographic algorithms computational complexity: the usage of error-correcting codes in the secret key recovery stage and the shared biocryptograms approach for the entire biometric encryption process.