Biometrics-based cryptographic key generation

Abstract

Instead of using PINs and passwords as cryptographic keys that are either easy to forget or vulnerable to dictionary attacks, easy-to-carry and difficult-to-transfer keys can be generated based on user-specific biometric information. In this paper, a framework is proposed to generate stable cryptographic keys from biometric data that is unstable in nature. The proposed framework differs from prior work in that user-dependent transforms are utilized to generate more compact and distinguishable features. Thereby, a longer and more stable bitstream can be generated as the cryptographic key. Experiments are performed on one face database to verify the feasibility of the proposed framework. The preliminary result is very encouraging.