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

4.2. Cryptographic Primitives

The direct employment of cryptographic primitives seems to be the most robust approach so far to tackle the challenging problem of privacy-preservation. Most of the state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols, however, were not designed taking into consideration the inherent variability of biometric data. In fact, cryptography tends to amplify small differences and it is not error-tolerant (e.g., hashing, AES, and RSA). The main cryptographic tools used to combat the leakage of private information during biometric authentication are secure multiparty computation (SMPC), verifiable computation (VC), and bloom filters (see Box 2).