Securing fingerprint template: Fuzzy vault with minutiae descriptors

Fuzzy vault has been shown to be an effective technique for securing fingerprint minutiae templates. Its security depends on the difficulty in identifying the set of genuine minutiae points among a mixture of genuine and chaff points and reconstructing the secure polynomial using the evaluations (ordinate values) available for each point in the vault. We show that the security of fuzzy vault can be improved by ldquoencryptingrdquo these polynomial evaluations using a fuzzy commitment scheme. This encryption makes it difficult for an adversary to decode the vault even if the correct set of minutiae is selected. We use minutiae descriptors, which capture orientation and ridge frequency information in a minutiapsilas neighborhood, for securing the polynomial evaluations. This modification leads to a significant increase in both the security (number of tries an adversary has to make in order to guess the secure key) and matching accuracy of the vault. We validate our results on FVC2002 DB2 and show that false accept rate (FAR) is reduced from 0.7% to 0.01% at a genuine accept rate (GAR) of 95%. At the same time, vault security as measured in terms of min-entropy, is increased from 31 bits to 47 bits in case a perfect code is used.