Privacy-enhancing fingerprint authentication using cancelable templates with passwords

Biometric based authentication can provide strong security guarantee about the identity of users. However, security of biometric data is particularly important as compromise of the data will be permanent. Cancelable biometrics store a non-invertible transformed version of the biometric data. Thus, even if the storage is compromised, the biometric data remains safe. Cancelable biometrics also provide a higher level of privacy by allowing many templates for the same biometric data and hence non-linkability of user's data stored in different databases. In this paper, we propose an approach for cancelable fingerprint templates by using the idea of fuzzy vault. By integrating the fuzzy fingerprint vault with the existing password-based authentication system, we can use a different "long and random" password for each application, and the fuzzy fingerprint vault can be changed by simply changing the password.