Research On The Combination Of Iris Recognition And Cryptography For Information Security

Thanks to the rapid development of multimedia and network technology, the digital media industry has step into a new era. Biometrics (especially the iris recognition technology) can ensure the content security of digital media since it provides a convenient and reliable way for user authentication. However, there exist many security problems in traditional iris recognition systems.Among the security problems the iris recognition systems are confronted with, this paper focused on the iris template security and its protection mechanisms. The combination of iris recognition and cryptography can not only provide an efficient mechanism for template protection, but also facilitate cryptographic key management, thus becomes a promising direction in information security field.In this paper, we firstly reviewed the basic theories of error control coding, cryptography and information security, and then studied a variety of iris template protection scheme that combining iris recognition and cryptography. In the key binding iris cryptosystem, the error control coding scheme and the pre-processing algorithm of iris data are the key factors that determine the system recognition and security performance. Based on the shortages of the traditional key binding iris cryptosystem, we proposed two methods for its improvement, referred to as the reliable region based key extraction method and the bit masking based key extraction method, respectively. In these methods, the concatenated coding scheme that combines Reed-Solomon code and convolutional code is proposed so that much longer keys can be extracted from the iris data, while the pre-processing schemes are proposed to minimize the iris intra-class variation. The experiment results show that our proposed methods are reasonable and efficient.