An Efficient Approach for Non-Invertible Cryptographic Key Generation from Cancelable Fingerprint Biometrics

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Abstract
The principal drawback of the existing cryptographic algorithms is the maintenance of their key's secrecy. Added with, human users have a difficult time remembering strong but lengthy cryptographic keys. As a result, utilizing individual's biometric features in the generation of strong and repeatable cryptographic keys has gained enormous popularity among researchers. The unpredictability of the user's biometric features, incorporated into the generated cryptographic key, makes the key unguessable to an attacker lacking noteworthy knowledge of the user's biometrics. Nevertheless, if a person's biometric is lost once, it will be compromised forever as it is inherently associated with the user. To overcome the above, cancelable biometrics has been proposed as an effective solution for canceling and re-issuing biometric templates. Here, we propose an innovative and efficient approach to generate a non-invertible cryptographic key from cancelable fingerprint templates. Initially, a one-way transformation is applied on the minutiae points extracted from the fingerprints, to attain a set of transformed points. Subsequently, the transformed points are made use of to form cancelable templates. The cancelable fingerprint templates are then utilized to generate a unique non-invertible key. As the cryptographic key generated is non-invertible, it is highly infeasible to acquire the cancelable fingerprint templates or the original fingerprint from the generated key. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by making use of fingerprints accessible from public sources.

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