Implementation and evaluation of a remote authentication system using touchless palmprint recognition

When a cellular phone is lost or stolen, it may be used improperly or the personal information may be stolen from it by a malicious user. Biometric authentication such as palmprint recognition is the strongest of the personal authentication technologies designed to prevent such misuse. In biometric authentication, when compared with a local authentication model, a remote authentication model has several advantages such as direct authentication and authentication levels. Ito et al. proposed several palmprint recognition schemes using correspondence matching based on the phase-only correlation. However, these schemes require a palmprint image to be captured with the hand touching the dedicated device, while palmprint images must be captured without such physical contact when using cellular phones. Thus, these schemes cannot be applied to cellular phones since there are large positioning gaps and large differences in brightness and distortion between the images. Furthermore, they have not been implemented in cellular phones and their performances have not been evaluated either. In this paper, we adopt a remote authentication model from the two types of biometric authentication incorporating the above advantages and propose a remote system between a cellular phone and an authentication server. We implement the proposed system using two different types of Android terminal as the terminal on the user side. We also show the validity of the proposed system by examining and confirming the accuracy and processing time. We furthermore discuss the problem of an impersonation attack on the proposed system and consider solutions to this problem from the viewpoints of security and usability. Then, we adopt a palmprint recognition scheme as a biometric authentication scheme and, in particular, use a palmprint recognition algorithm that incorporates Yoruk et al.'s preprocessing technique to Ito et al.'s and Iitsuka et al.'s schemes.