Fuzzy extractors for continuous distributions

Abstract

We show that there is a direct relation between the maximum length of the keys extracted from biometric data and the error rates of the biometric system. The length of the bio-key depends on the amount of information that can be extracted from the source data. This information can be used a-priori to evaluate the potential of the biometric data in the context of a specific cryptographic application. We model the biometric data more naturally as a continuous distribution and we give a new definition for fuzzy extractors that works better for this type of data.