2007/01/16 by Davide Schipani, Schipani, Davide, Joachim Rosenthal +1
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Biometric Identification and Security #Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #User Authentication and Security Systems #cs.CR #cs.IT #math.IT
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0701102
the final version appeared in Proceedings Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2010, IEEE copyright
openalex publication_date 2007/01/16 · arxiv created 2011/08/30 · arxiv updated 2011/08/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The paper studies the problem of securely storing biometric passwords, such as fingerprints and irises. With the help of coding theory Juels and Wattenberg derived in 1999 a scheme where similar input strings will be accepted as the same biometric. In the same time nothing could be learned from the stored data. They called their scheme a "fuzzy commitment scheme". In this paper we will revisit the solution of Juels and Wattenberg and we will provide answers to two important questions: What type of error-correcting codes should be used and what happens if biometric templates are not uniformly distributed, i.e. the biometric data come with redundancy. Answering the first question will lead us to the search for low-rate large-minimum distance error-correcting codes which come with efficient decoding algorithms up to the designed distance. In order to answer the second question we relate the rate required with a quantity connected to the "entropy" of the string, trying to estimate a sort of "capacity", if we want to see a flavor of the converse of Shannon's noisy coding theorem. Finally we deal with side-problems arising in a practical implementation and we propose a possible solution to the main one that seems to have so far prevented real life applications of the fuzzy scheme, as far as we know.