Privacy Evaluation Protocols for the Evaluation of Soft-Biometric Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Abstract

Biometric data includes privacy-sensitive information, such as soft-biometrics. Soft-biometric privacy enhancing technologies aim at limiting the possibility of deducing such information. Previous works proposed several solutions to this problem using several different evaluation processes, metrics, and attack scenarios. The absence of a standardized evaluation protocol makes a meaningful comparison of these solutions difficult. In this work, we propose privacy evaluation protocols (PEPs) for privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) dealing with soft-biometric privacy. Our framework evaluates PETs in the most critical scenario of an attacker that knows and adapts to the systems privacy-mechanism. Moreover, our PEPs differentiate between PET of learning-based or training-free nature. To ensure that our protocol meets the highest standards in both cases, it is based on Kerckhoffs‘s principle of cryptography.