The Cryptographic Layer of Biometric Authentication

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the cryptographic layer for biometric authentication. The layer is added on the top of an authentication scheme for security and privacy reasons. We first formalize a biometric authentication scheme and propose security models for two security properties of interest: unforgeability and indistinguishability. Unforgeability refers to an adversary’s ability to impersonate a user, while indistinguishability evaluates an adversary’s knowledge of users’ biometrics, related to privacy preservation. We then introduce generic constructions using a digital signature scheme and a public-key encryption scheme to achieve the two security properties, respectively. To overcome the limitations of these generic constructions, we further analyze existing instantiations of biometric authentication built on the cryptographic primitives: function-hiding inner product functional encryption. Our results demonstrate conditions for the biometrics and the cryptographic instantiations under which these schemes achieve security within our security model.

Keng-Yu Chen (陳耕宇)

PhD Student

My research interests include theoretical aspects of cryptographic constructions and side-channel analysis