Key Management Using Biometrics

The security of cryptosystems lies in three main factors: the complexity of the encryption algorithm, the length of the key, and safe storage of the key. Safe storage of the key, which is known as key management, is the most vulnerable area in the encryption process. Since biometrics requires the physical presence of the user, we can use biometric data to protect the cipher key. But the main obstacle of the integration is that biometric data are noisy while cryptography requires keys to be exactly right. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme using biometrics, which can generate constant and accurate keys from noisy biometric samples every time. The proposed scheme includes key binding and key retrieval, utilizing a multivariate linear equation and its solution space to generate repeatable keys. Our experiments use fingerprint as an instance, and results show good performance in terms of both accuracy and speed. This scheme can also be applied to other biometric identifiers such as face ,iris, voice, etc., with most substeps being the same except the generation of false feature elements and the process of feature matching.