Effectiveness of Fully Homomorphic Encryption to Preserve the Privacy of Biometric Data

Abstract

Biometrics offers higher accuracy for personal recognition as well as provides greater security than traditional methods because of its properties. However, ironically, these properties are also weaknesses because biometric data is permanently linked with an individual and cannot be revoked or cancelled, especially when biometric data is compromised, which can lead to a serious privacy issue. By reviewing current approaches, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is considered as a promising solution for this privacy issue because of its ability to perform computations in the encrypted domain. We studied the effectiveness of FHE when it is used in biometric systems. The main contributions of this paper are the implementation of a privacy-preserving iris biometric authentication protocol adapted to lattice-based FHE and a sound security analysis of authentication and privacy. This work is concluded with some factors to be addressed to enhance privacy as well as some considerations to improve the performance of this implementation.