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Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other Noisy Data

2006/02/28 by Yevgeniy Dodis, Rafail Ostrovsky, Leonid Reyzin +1 · 1,731 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Algorithm #Biometric Identification and Security #Biometrics #Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption #Closeness #Computer science #Computer security #Cryptographic primitive #Cryptographic protocol #Cryptography #Data mining #Hamming distance #Mathematics #Randomness #Sketch #Theoretical computer science #USable #User Authentication and Security Systems #cs.CR #cs.IT #math.IT

paper · pdf · doi:10.1137/060651380

published in SIAM Journal on Computing 38(1), 97-139 (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) · 47 pp., 3 figures. Prelim. version in Eurocrypt 2004, Springer LNCS 3027, pp. 523-540. Differences from version 3: minor edits for grammar, clarity, and typos

openalex publication_date 2008/01/01 · arxiv created 2008/04/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We provide formal definitions and efficient secure techniques for - turning noisy information into keys usable for any cryptographic application, and, in particular, - reliably and securely authenticating biometric data. Our techniques apply not just to biometric information, but to any keying material that, unlike traditional cryptographic keys, is (1) not reproducible precisely and (2) not distributed uniformly. We propose two primitives: a "fuzzy extractor" reliably extracts nearly uniform randomness R from its input; the extraction is error-tolerant in the sense that R will be the same even if the input changes, as long as it remains reasonably close to the original. Thus, R can be used as a key in a cryptographic application. A "secure sketch" produces public information about its input w that does not reveal w, and yet allows exact recovery of w given another value that is close to w. Thus, it can be used to reliably reproduce error-prone biometric inputs without incurring the security risk inherent in storing them. We define the primitives to be both formally secure and versatile, generalizing much prior work. In addition, we provide nearly optimal constructions of both primitives for various measures of ``closeness'' of input data, such as Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference.

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