A Secure Biometric Key Generation Mechanism via Deep Learning and Its Application

• Main Authors: Yazhou Wang, Bing Li, Yan Zhang, Jiaxin Wu, Qianya Ma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-09-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: biometrics; security; privacy; deep learning
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/18/8497

Biometric keys are widely used in the digital identity system due to the inherent uniqueness of biometrics. However, existing biometric key generation methods may expose biometric data, which will cause users’ biometric traits to be permanently unavailable in the secure authentication system. To enhance its security and privacy, we propose a secure biometric key generation method based on deep learning in this paper. Firstly, to prevent the information leakage of biometric data, we utilize random binary codes to represent biometric data and adopt a deep learning model to establish the relationship between biometric data and random binary code for each user. Secondly, to protect the privacy and guarantee the revocability of the biometric key, we add a random permutation operation to shuffle the elements of binary code and update a new biometric key. Thirdly, to further enhance the reliability and security of the biometric key, we construct a fuzzy commitment module to generate the helper data without revealing any biometric information during enrollment. Three benchmark datasets including ORL, Extended YaleB, and CMU-PIE are used for evaluation. The experiment results show our scheme achieves a genuine accept rate (GAR) higher than the state-of-the-art methods at a 1% false accept rate (FAR), and meanwhile satisfies the properties of revocability and randomness of biometric keys. The security analyses show that our model can effectively resist information leakage, cross-matching, and other attacks. Moreover, the proposed model is applied to a data encryption scenario in our local computer, which takes less than 0.5 s to complete the whole encryption and decryption at different key lengths.