Biometrics

Some consider biometrics as intrusive and as a violation of privacy. While you read, pay attention to how biometric systems authenticate and to the three main threats against biometric systems. What are these three threats and what are the cryptographic and non-cryptographic countermeasures?

4. Challenges and Countermeasures

The main question that one needs to address when designing a privacy-preserving biometric authentication protocol is: How to guarantee privacy-preservation without downgrading the accuracy of a biometric authentication system?

Among the most challenging problems in designing efficient and privacy-preserving biometric authentication systems there are (1) the resistance to impersonation attacks; (2) the irrevocability of biometric templates; and (3) guarantee that personal information remains private. In the following, we provide a list of methods that have been used to achieve privacy-preserving authentication, and we highlight the main advantages and disadvantages of each approach.