Simulated annealing attack on certain fingerprint authentication systems

Abstract

This paper describes a simple and generic attack against minutiae-based fingerprint authentication systems. The aim of the attack is to construct a fingerprint minutiae template, compliant to ISO/IEC standards, that matches a fixed but unknown target fingerprint. Our attack is expected to be most effective against systems that employ vicinity-based matching algorithms, i.e. systems that divide fingerprints into multiple regions and then compute similarity over these regions. The effectiveness of our attack is experimentally demonstrated against the recently proposed `Protected Minutiae Cylinder Code' (PMCC) scheme.