Cancelable Biometrics for Better Security and Privacy in Biometric Systems

We present a simple scheme with three main features: (1) it induces revocability in biometrics based user authentication systems, (2) protects the biometric information, and (3) improves the verification performance. The user's biometric feature vector is shuffled with a user specific shuffling key to transform into a revocable template. Comparison between different templates is carried out in the transformed domain. If the template is compromised, it can be replaced with another template obtained by changing the shuffling key. This scheme makes cross-matching between databases impossible by issuing different templates for different applications. The performance evaluation of the system is carried out on two modalities: iris and face using publicly available databases. This scheme significantly improves the verification performance of the underlying biometric system, e.g., it reduces the Equal Error Rate (EER) from 1.67% to 0.23% on the NIST-ICE iris database. The EER on the NIST-FRGCv2 face database reduces from 8.10% to zero.