Customisation of paillier homomorphic encryption for efficient binary biometric feature vector matching

Abstract

Computing the Hamming weight between binary biometric feature vectors in a homomorphic encryption domain can be rather inefficient due to the required bitwise encryption. A biometric matching technique more efficient than the Goldwasser- Micali approach is proposed based on exploiting Paillier's capability of encrypting messages larger than one bit at a time. The efficiency is documented in an iris identification context.