Research On Enhancing The Security And Privacy Of Biometrics Systems

With the large-scale proliferation of biometrics-based personal authentication systems, its security and privacy concerns have emerged as a hot research issue. A lot of researches have been conducted on the pattern recognition area of biometrics regime, unfortunately; the critical security and privacy issues to attain the reliable and trustworthy identity authentication are being ignored. A biometrics system, even with significant recognition performance, is only universally acceptable if it is secure, reliable, robust against attacks and threats, and protects a user's privacy in efficient manner.To overcome the biometrics security challenges and to alleviate the biometrics privacy issues, in this thesis, we investigate the methods and techniques aiming at thwarting the aforementioned problems inherent in biometrics systems.For the secure transmission of biometrics data over insecure network channel, two different modes of data hiding schemes are proposed. The first method, which is image-based hidden transmission of biometrics template, hides the biometric data into a group of different images. Secret keys are generated by the biometric image and encryption is applied on the biometric templates before hiding into the host images. Decoding performance of hidden templates is encouraging and outperforms in the case of transmission attacks on the cover image. The second proposed method is an audio signal-based covert-transmission scheme of biometric templates, in which we used a novel chaos and NDFT-based template hiding scheme, and proved that the combination of encryption, encoding, modulation, and data hiding of biometric template in audio signal could not affect the identification performance of the biometric recognition system. The biometric data extraction performance of the system is efficiently capable of identifying a person without stringent compromise of matching accuracy.To obstruct the non-liveness and retransmission issues of biometrics images, a challenge/response-based biometrics image scrambling system and method is proposed. In contrast to general challenge/response systems, which issue challenges to the user, our scheme is based on a novel architecture of intelligent biometrics sensor that has computational power to receive challenges from the authentication server and generate...