Biometrics-based cryptographic key generation

Abstract

Instead of using PINs and passwords as cryptographic keys that are either easy to forget or vulnerable to dictionary attacks, easy-to-carry and difficult-to-transfer keys can be generated based on user-specific biometric information. A framework is proposed to generate stable cryptographic keys from biometric data that is unstable in nature. The proposed framework differs from prior work in that user-dependent transforms are utilized to generate more compact and distinguishable features. Thereby, a longer and more stable bitstream can be generated as the cryptographic key. Experiments are performed on a face database to verify the feasibility of the proposed framework. The preliminary result is very encouraging.