A survey of attacks on iris biometric systems

Abstract

Biometric recognition has several applications that provide reliable solutions to the user authentication problem. Its widespread use and popularity is itself making it prone to several vulnerabilities. Iris is emerging as one of the most popular and accurate biometrics. Due to its inherent advantages and uniqueness, it is gaining popularity as a powerful authentication tool. However, the iris recognition systems may suffer from various attacks at different points during the authentication process. This article intends to review the popular attacks on the iris biometric, which affects its security, and present a survey on the approaches taken by various researchers to mitigate these attacks. The attacks have been divided into three categories, namely - user level, user-system interface level and stored database attacks. We present an overview of these attacks and analyse the algorithms proposed in the literature that are usually used to secure iris biometric systems from these attacks.