Improved fuzzy vault scheme for alignment-free fingerprint features

Abstract

The fuzzy vault scheme is one of the most prominent tools for protecting fingerprint templates, typically being minutiae-based. However, there exist two major problems. Firstly, the fuzzy vault scheme is vulnerable to attacks correlating different templates of the same user. Secondly, auxiliary alignment data may leak information about the protected fingerprints which negatively affects security and privacy. In this paper, we tackle both problems. Our implementation uses alignment-free fingerprint features and fusions thereof, thereby removing the need to store alignment parameters. Furthermore, the features are passed through a quantization scheme and then dispersed in a maximal number of chaff, thereby thwarting correlation attacks.