CS406: Information Security

Verifiable computation (VC) techniques enable a client to outsource computations to a remote server in a secure way. After performing the calculations, the server returns to the client the result together with a proof asserting the correctness of the returned result (for the outsourced computation). The client only needs to check the proof to convince itself of the correctness of the returned output. At first it might appear that VC has little or no connections to biometric authentication; however the linking point lies in the need for outsourcing the matching process to a third party (e.g., the computational server in the distributed architecture depicted in Figure 1). Incorporating VC in a BAS in a secure way allows speeding up the matching process, without introducing additional privacy leakage; for example, it is harder to perform centre search attacks. Recent works provide solutions on how to securely apply verifiable computing techniques to the main algorithms for biometric matching.