Improved and innovative key generation algorithms for biometric cryptosystems

Traditional cryptography provides powerful mechanisms to achieve information security but suffers from the key management problems. Biometrics has been an alternative measure for user authentication and identification based on physiological and behavioral characteristics of persons but still suffers from various biometric variations (due to wear-and-tear, accidental injuries, malfunctions, and pathophysiological development), improper acquisition and inconsistent representation of the biometric signal. Then comes the biometric cryptosystem which blends the cryptography and biometrics to reflect the combined strength of the two fields along with wiping out some common drawbacks in them. The key is dynamically generated from the biometric data instead of storing somewhere and used for authentication or input to cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we have studied a previously proposed algorithm for biometric key generation from fingerprint, analyzed it, improved it and proposed a new distance based key generation algorithm for the same purpose.