Cancellability and diversity analysis of fingerprint template protection scheme based on compact minutiae pattern

ABSTRACT

As fingerprints continue toward ubiquity in human recognition applications, growing fingerprint databases will pose an increasingly greater risk of irreversible identity theft in the event of a database breach. Consequently, more focus is being placed on researching new and effective ways of securing fingerprint templates during database storage. Recently, a new fingerprint template protection scheme, based on representing a fingerprint by a sparse 3-, 4-, or 5-minutiae pattern, has been proposed. The most important advantage of this method over other fingerprint template protection schemes is that it employs only a small number of identifying features in the creation of the protected template, such that it is impossible to recover the original fingerprint even if the protected template is compromised. In this article, we present a thorough analysis to demonstrate that this new fingerprint construct also boasts impressive cancellability and diversity properties. Cancellability allows for the replacement of a compromised template with a new template from the same fingerprint, and diversity enables a person to enroll into multiple applications using the same fingerprint without the prospect of being tracked across the different applications.