Embedded security: New trends in personal recognition systems

Nowadays biometrics and embedded systems technologies bring the required means to face those security challenges in the current technological age. The electronic age points to the embedded security as one efficient solution for those applications where confidential treatment of the information is needed. Moreover, the genuine biometric characteristics of each individual become the most reliable features to be used as personal identifiers in front of the world, replacing those low-security tokens such as ID cards, PINs and passwords. Following this direction, the HW-SW co-design of a fingerprint-based personal recognition system embedded on a dynamically reconfigurable platform is suggested in this work. The selected system architecture provides the power to design these high performance applications at low cost.