Biometric Template Security: Issues and Challenges

Dr. Sheikh Ziauddin

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT) 2011

Options for Authentication

There are three types of data which can be used for entity authentication
 Something the user knows (passwords)  Something the user has (hardware tokens)  Something the user is (biometrics)

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Drawbacks of Password-based Systems

A password can be forgotten It can be compromised Many passwords can be guessed by carrying out an extensive search for known dictionary words The entropy of passwords vary considerably from user to user

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Drawbacks of Hardware Token-based Systems

Hardware tokens can be stolen They can be forged They can be compromised A user can forget to carry them along

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Biometric Authentication Systems

Biometric authentication is more reliable than password-based authentication Biometric characteristics cannot be lost or forgotten They are extremely difficult to copy, share, and distribute Require the person being authenticated to be present
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Biometric Authentication Systems

It is difficult to forge biometrics It is unlikely for a user to repudiate All users have a relatively equal entropy But biometric authentication systems have their own issues

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Biometrics Template Protection: Motivation

Biometric data stored in plain form is susceptible to theft

Alice
Biometric Template

Alice

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Biometrics Template Protection: Motivation

Theft of biometric template corresponds to the theft of identity

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Biometrics Template Protection: Motivation

Store hashed templates?
Alice
Biometric Template Enrollment

Alice
Biometric Template Verification

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Biometrics Template Protection: Motivation

Store hashed templates?
Alice Biometric Template

Enrollment

H(

Alice

Alice Biometric Template

H(

Alice

Verification

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Biometrics Template Protection: Properties

An ideal biometric template protection scheme should possess the following four properties
    Diversity Revocability Security Performance

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Biometrics Template Protection: Categories

Template protection schemes can be categorized into two main categories:
 Feature Transformation  Biometric Cryptosystem

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Feature Transformation
A transformation function F is applied to the biometric template T
 Only the transformed template F(T,K) is stored in the database

The same transformation function is applied to query features Q

 Transformed query F(Q,K) is directly matched against the transformed template F(T,K)
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Feature Transformation
Salting
 Transformation function is invertible

Non-invertible transformation
 Transformation function is one-way

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Biometric Cryptosystems
They have 2 secrets: biometric template and cryptographic key
 Both must be protected

Some public information about the biometric template is stored Public information is usually referred to as helper data The helper data should not reveal much about template or key
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Biometric Cryptosystems
Key Binding Systems
 The helper data is obtained by binding a key with the biometric template  Computationally hard to recover either the key or the original template  Matching involves recovery of the key from the helper data using the query biometric features

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Biometric Cryptosystems
Key Generation Systems
 Helper data (key) is derived only from the biometric template  The helper data and the query biometric features combine to generate the key

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A Sample Key Binding Scheme: Ziauddin and Dailey [1]

At enrollment time, key and biometric template are merged and only this merged value stored on a smart card
Pseudorandom Number Generator

Discard Merge
Smart card

Discard

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A Sample Key Binding Scheme

At verification time, key is regenerated with the help of a fresh biometric scan and the data stored on the smart card
Smart card

Merge

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Major Challenge
The fuzziness has to be removed
Enrollment
Alice Biometric Template

Alice Biometric Template

Verification

We use Error Control Codes to remove fuzziness

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Background: Error Control Codes

In telecommunications, error control codes (ECC) are used to correct errors introduced during transmission over a noisy channel. Before transmitting a message, some redundancy is added to it to get a larger codeword (called encoding). This redundant data helps in reconstructing the transmitted codeword from the received corrupted codeword (called decoding).
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Background: Error Control Codes

Each ECC can correct a certain number of errors in a received codeword called error correction capability of the code. We will represent a code as (n,k,t) code where n is codeword size, k is message size and t is error correction capability. In particular, we use BCH code
 (4095,260,696)-BCH code
Codeword (template) length = 4095 bits Message (key) length = 260 bits Error correction capability = 696 bits
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Background: Error Control Codes

Biometric readings of the same user taken at enrollment and verification times can be treated as the transmitted data and the received data respectively over a noisy channel.

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Background: Iris Template Generation

Image Acquisition

Iris Segmentation

Iris Normalization Template Mask

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Feature Encoding
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Background: Iris Template Generation

Both template and mask are binary strings Mask tells whether a particular point belongs to the iris (1) or it represents noise (0)

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Overview of Our Scheme

Codeword Secret Key Recovery Information Corrupted Codeword

Biometric Template

Biometric Template

K = K iff W and W belong to the same person

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Proposed System
Biometric enrollment process Biometric verification process

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Biometric Enrollment Process

Biometric Template Generation Reliable Bit Selection (To minimize fuzziness) Encoding using BCH Code (To remove fuzziness)

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Iris Template Generation

We use 3 images per subject for enrollment Generate 3 (base) templates (and masks) per subject corresponding to three images using the steps described earlier

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Reliable Bit Selection

Generate a single final template and a flag vector for each subject using reliable bit selection technique

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Reliable Bit Selection

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Key Encoding
Key encoding using BCH codes
 (4095,260,696)-BCH code
Codeword length = 4095 bits Message (key) length = 260 bits Error correction capability = 696 bits

BCH code sizes are 2m 1 m too small small key M too large slow decoding We use m = 12 to get a good balance

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Biometric Enrollment Process

K: Secret key R: Recovery information F: Flag

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C: Codeword W: Final template H: Hash of key

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Biometric Verification Process

We take one image per subject

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Biometric Verification Process

K: Recovered key R: Recovery information F: Flag

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C: Recovered codeword W: Final template H,H: Hash of key

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Experimental Evaluation
Iris Dataset: University of Bath iris dataset
 A total of 1000 images  20 images of each eye captured from each of 25 subjects  We used all right eye images  We used 3 images per subject for final template generation and remaining 17 for testing

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Verification Results
Error Correction Capability (Bits) 573 614 655 696 737 778 819 860 601 HD Threshold 0.14 0.15 0.16 0.17 0.18 0.19 0.2 0.21 0.22 Key Size (Bits) 322 322 322 260 176 98 98 98 47 FRR % 1.65 1.18 0.94 0.24 0.24 0.24 0 0 0 FAR % 0 0 0 0 0.01 0.03 0.11 0.21 0.37

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Comparison with Existing Systems

Researcher(s) Monrose et al. (1999) Monrose et al. (2001) Goh and Ngo (2003) Uludag et al. (2005) Hao et al. (2006) Santos et al. (2006) Yang and Verbauwhede (2007) Lee et al. (2008) Ziauddin and Dailey (2010) [1] Biometric Trait Used Keystroke patterns Voice Face Fingerprints Iris Handwritten signatures Iris Iris Iris Key Size (Bits) 15 46 80 128 140 128 92 128 260 FRR % 18 17 0.93 21 0.47 57 0.8 0.32 to 31.8 0.24

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Security Analysis
The user has two secrets
 Biometrics  Smart cards

We assume that the adversary can steal one of the two secrets

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Security Analysis
1. Biometrics is compromised
 The chances of a particular biometric trait being compromised depends on the trait
Face and voice are easy to capture Retina and iris are hard to capture

 The adversary has to find a 4095-bit codeword with a message size of 260 bits  The brute force attack requires 2260 attempts which is not feasible

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Security Analysis
2. Smart card is compromised
 We use iris templates of 4095 bits having an estimated degree of freedom of 249 bits [2]  There is no systematic correlation in iris templates  Assuming adversary knows all correlations, then to guess the original template, the adversary has to find a 249-bit string requiring a BF effort of 2249 bits  Continued on next slide

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Security Analysis
2. Smart card is compromised (cont.)
 Due to BCH error correction, the adversary will win if he/she finds a 249-bit string with a distance of 42 bits (17%)  Using sphere-packing bound, this will need 290 attempts
Still reasonably high Higher than all previous systems Not only string generation, but also xor, decode, and hash

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References
1. Ziauddin, S. and Dailey, M. (2010), Robust Iris Verification for Key Management ', Pattern Recognition Letters 31(9), 926935. 2. Daugman, J. (2003), 'The importance of being random: statistical principles of iris recognition', Pattern Recognition 36(2), 279291.

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Thank You and Questions