Towards a fast and secure fingerprint authentication system based on a novel encoding scheme

Abstract

Fingerprint-based authentication systems in general are prone to several security vulnerabilities. Authentication systems such as Biometric crypto systems, Cancellable templates and Bio-hashing provide a solution for addressing these vulnerabilities. But these systems are vulnerable to the unauthorized access resulting from the spoofed fingerprint templates by the fraudulent users. Hence, it is essential to enhance the features of the existing Biometric fingerprint-based authentication systems. An extensive research has been carried out by various researchers on the existing fingerprint authentication system techniques and it is found that none of them are fully capable of eliminating the security vulnerabilities. Fingerprint authentication system technique based on one time fingerprint template provides a solution for this by generating one time template from the fingerprint features. Although this method addresses vulnerability issues to a certain extent, improvements are highly essential particularly in terms of their security and performance. There are several systems based on finger code, where fingerprint features will be converted into finger code using a circular tessellation technique. Although authentication based on this technique improves security, the possibility of compromising the finger code is a huge threat, which needs to be addressed. In this paper, an innovative model is proposed which generates a secure one time finger code during every user authentication. It is generated using finger code obtained from minutiae vectors using a circular tessellation approach, pseudo-random number generators and timestamp, which are generated during every user transaction session. This unique encoding approach makes it extremely difficult for an unauthorized user to decode the generated finger code that is used for a particular authentication session. Thus, the possibility of compromise of original fingerprint can be avoided and thus security of biometric system can be enhanced. The proposed system also provides better performance in terms of its accuracy, processing speed and complexity.