The Research Of The Key Problems Of A Biometric Authentication System For Citizen Identification

Biometric authentication has been gaining increasing popularity. There are many kinds of biometrics, such as fingerprint, iris, retina, palmprint, voice etc, all sharing the following characteristics:I. UniquenessThe biometric can identify the individual person uniquely.II. StabilityThe biometric will not change noticeably over the course of a person's lifetime.III. UniversalityThe major population has the biometric for authentication.IV. MeasurabilityThe biometric can be easily scanned or read in the field.Among all these forms of biometric authentication, fingerprint authentication is most extensively used.Shanghai, the pilot city for the social security card development, issued the first Social Security Cards (SSC) on January 1st, 2001. Within the card stores the fingerprint information of the owner of the card, yet the authentication subsystem contains severe potential problems, namely:I. The authentication subsystem is based on password authentication, which is infamous for its fragility.II. The fingerprint information stored in the card is the fingerprint features calculated by a single algorithm, which leads to its lack of extensibility.III. The SSC system must serve thousands upon thousand of citizens, yet statistically, a smallpercent of the population can't use fingerprint biometric for authentication, so it's necessary to leverage other forms of biometric authentication. IV. The SSC system has many application subsystems, so it requires a secure, consistent authentication subsystem.Based on this background, this thesis tries to provide a solution for SSC and other applications that need biometric authentication.This biometric authentication system boasts following highlights.I. Excellent system architecture.The combination of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and N-tier architecture offers two kinds of capabilities. First, SOA makes it possible to be easily integrated into application subsystems of the SSC system, also to be sold as a service to other application systems. In addition, in order to maximize its performance, it provides two kinds of services, Web Service and RemotingService. N-tier makes it extensible, maintainable and scalable.II. Great extensibility and integration.The integration capability is reflected in following ways:1) 11 can be integrated into all kinds of application systems.2) It can accommodate different algorithms of a particular form of biometric authentication.3) It can accommodate different forms of biometric authentication.III. Solid performance and security based on many different measures.The key tiers for performance and security are the interface tier and the data access tier. Newest and/or the most effective technologies are employed to improve these two ties. For example, WSE 2.0 toolkit is used to enhance the web service tier, which is the newest release for web service development by Microsoft. Symmetricencryption, asymmetric encryption, hash, WS-Security protocol and other methods are used to safeguard data during transport and storage.The organization of the thesis is centered on how to solve the key technical problems:I. The second chapter is dedicated to explain the architecture of the system, the combination of SOA and n-tier, which is the foundation to solve other problems;II. The third chapter solves the problem of integrating with other application systems;III. The fourth chapter solves the problem of integrating different algorithms of one form of biometric authentication and different forms of biometric authentication.IV. The fifth chapter solves performance, security and other technical problems.