Chaotic secure content-based hidden transmission of biometric templates

The large-scale proliferation of biometric verification systems creates a demand for effective and reliable security and privacy of its data. Like passwords and PIN codes, biometric data is also not secret and if it is compromised, the integrity of the whole verification system could be at high risk. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel Chaotic secure content-based hidden transmission scheme of biometric data. Encryption and data hiding techniques are used to improve the security and secrecy of the transmitted templates. Secret keys are generated by the biometric image and used as the parameter value and initial condition of the chaotic map, and each transaction session has different secret keys to protect from the attacks. Two chaotic maps are incorporated for the encryption to resolve the finite word length effect and to improve the system's resistance against attacks. Encryption is applied on the biometric templates before hiding into the cover/host images to make them secure, and then templates are hidden into the cover image. Experimental results show that the security, performance, and accuracy of the presented scheme are encouraging comparable with other methods found in the current literature. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.