2021/11/24 by Gaëtan Pradel, Pradel, Gaëtan, Chris J. Mitchell +1 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Biometric Identification and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data #User Authentication and Security Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.12372
openalex publication_date 2021/11/24 · openalex created_date 2022/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Biometric matching involves storing and processing sensitive user information. Maintaining the privacy of this data is thus a major challenge, and homomorphic encryption offers a possible solution. We propose a privacy-preserving biometrics-based authentication protocol based on fully homomorphic encryption, where the biometric sample for a user is gathered by a local device but matched against a biometric template by a remote server operating solely on encrypted data. The design ensures that 1) the user's sensitive biometric data remains private, and 2) the user and client device are securely authenticated to the server. A proof-of-concept implementation building on the TFHE library is also presented, which includes the underlying basic operations needed to execute the biometric matching. Performance results from the implementation show how complex it is to make FHE practical in this context, but it appears that, with implementation optimisations and improvements, the protocol could be used for real-world applications.