A fingerprint based crypto-biometric system for secure communication

To maintain secrecy of information during communication, cryptography is considered to be an impressive solution and cryptographic keys play an important role to ensure the security. However, these randomly derived keys (of 256 bits) are hard to memorize. Also, there is a threat of privacy invasion since the storage, protection and transmission of a key over a communication link may lead to information leakage. Therefore, researchers propose to utilize user’s biometric trait to generate the cryptographic key in a session-based communication environment. This avoids the storage of cryptographic keys without negotiating on secrecy. The biometric-based key generation encompasses concerns over biometric template protection, biometric data sharing between users and revocable key generation from biometric. To address the aforementioned concerns, we propose a framework for secure communication between two users using a fingerprint-based crypto-biometric system. First, the feature bit-string are computed from the users’ fingerprint. Next, revocable transformation is applied to derive the private keys of respective users. Then, the Diffie–Hellman (DH) algorithm is used to generate public keys from private keys of both sender and receiver, which are shared and further used to produce a symmetric cryptographic key at both ends. Here, the biometric data is neither stored nor shared which ensures the security of biometric data. Also, perfect forward secrecy is achieved using session keys. This work also provides the long-term protection of messages communicated between two users. It is evident from the experimental evaluation over four datasets of FVC2002, four datasets of FVC 2004, and NIST special database IV that the proposed framework is privacy-preserving and could be utilized for real access control systems.