Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition

Face recognition is increasingly deployed as a means to unobtrusively verify the identity of people. The widespread use of biometrics raises important privacy concerns, in particular if the biometric matching process is performed at a central or untrusted server, and calls for the implementation of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies. In this paper we propose for the first time a strongly privacy-enhanced face recognition system, which allows to efficiently hide both the biometrics and the result from the server that performs the matching operation, by using techniques from secure multiparty computation. We consider a scenario where one party provides a face image, while another party has access to a, database of facial templates. Our protocol allows to jointly run the standard Eigenfaces recognition algorithm in such a way that the first party cannot learn from the execution of the protocol more than basic parameters of the database; while the second party does not learn the input image or the result; of the recognition process. At the core of our. protocol lies an efficient, protocol for securely comparing two Pailler-encrypted numbers. We show through extensive experiments that the system can be run efficiently on conventional hardware.