This article is part of the series Advanced Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition Methods for Biometrics.

Open Access Review Article

Biometric Template Security

Anil K Jain, Karthik Nandakumar* and Abhishek Nagar

Author Affiliations

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, 3115 Engineering Building, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

For all author emails, please log on.

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2008, 2008:579416  doi:10.1155/2008/579416


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/579416


Received: 2 July 2007
Revisions received: 28 September 2007
Accepted: 4 December 2007

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society.

Publisher note

To access the full article, please see PDF.