Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Biometrics identi es/veri es a person using his/her physiological or behavioral characteristics. It is becoming an important ally for law enforcement and homeland security. Among all the biometric modalities, iris is tested to be the most accurate one. However, most existing methods are not designed for non-cooperative users and cannot work with o -angle or low quality iris images. In this thesis, we propose a robust multi-stage feature extraction and matching approach for non-cooperative iris recognition. We developed the SURF-like method to extract stable feature points, used Gabor Descriptor method for local feature description, and designed the multi- stage feature extraction and matching scheme to improve the recognition accuracy and speed. The related experimental results show that the proposed method is very promising. In addition, two template security enhanced schemes for the proposed non- cooperative iris recognition are introduced. The related experimental results show that these two schemes can e ectively realize cancelability of the enrolled biometric templates while at the same time achieving high accuracy.

Personal identity refers to a set of attributes (e.g., name, social insurance number, etc.) that are associated with a person. Identity management is the process of creating, maintaining and destroying identities of individuals in a population. Biometric technologies are technologies developed to use statistical analysis of an individual’s biological or behavioral traits to determine his identity. Biometrics based authentication systems offer a reliable solution for identity management, because of their uniqueness, relative stability over time and security (among other reasons). Public acceptance of biometric systems will depend on their ability to ensure robustness, accuracy and security. Although robustness and accuracy of such systems are rapidly improving, there still remain some issues of security and balancing it with privacy. While the uniqueness of biometric traits offers a convenient and reliable means of identification, it also poses the risk of unauthorized cross-referencing among databases using the same biometric trait. There is also a high risk in case of a biometric database being compromised, since it’s not possible to revoke the biometric trait and re-issue a new one as is the case with passwords and smart keys. This unique attribute of biometric based authentication system poses a challenge that might slow down public acceptance and the use of biometrics for authentication purposes in large scale applications. In this research we investigate the vulnerabilities of biometric systems focusing on template security in iris-based biometric recognition systems. The iris has been well studied for authentication purposes and has been proven accurate in large scale applications in several airports and border crossings around the world. The most widely accepted iris recognition systems are based on Daugman’s model that creates a binary iris template. In this research we develop different systems using watermarking, bio-cryptography as well as feature transformation to achieve revocability and security of binary templates in iris based biometric authentication systems, while maintaining the performance that enables widespread application of these systems. All algorithms developed in this research are applicable on already existing biometric authentication systems and do not require redesign of these existing, well established iris-based authentication systems that use binary templates.

Personal identity refers to a set of attributes (e.g., name, social insurance number, etc.) that are associated with a person. Identity management is the process of creating, maintaining and destroying identities of individuals in a population. Biometric technologies are technologies developed to use statistical analysis of an individual’s biological or behavioral traits to determine his identity. Biometrics based authentication systems offer a reliable solution for identity management, because of their uniqueness, relative stability over time and security (among other reasons). Public acceptance of biometric systems will depend on their ability to ensure robustness, accuracy and security. Although robustness and accuracy of such systems are rapidly improving, there still remain some issues of security and balancing it with privacy. While the uniqueness of biometric traits offers a convenient and reliable means of identification, it also poses the risk of unauthorized cross-referencing among databases using the same biometric trait. There is also a high risk in case of a biometric database being compromised, since it’s not possible to revoke the biometric trait and re-issue a new one as is the case with passwords and smart keys. This unique attribute of biometric based authentication system poses a challenge that might slow down public acceptance and the use of biometrics for authentication purposes in large scale applications. In this research we investigate the vulnerabilities of biometric systems focusing on template security in iris-based biometric recognition systems. The iris has been well studied for authentication purposes and has been proven accurate in large scale applications in several airports and border crossings around the world. The most widely accepted iris recognition systems are based on Daugman’s model that creates a binary iris template. In this research we develop different systems using watermarking, bio-cryptography as well as feature transformation to achieve revocability and security of binary templates in iris based biometric authentication systems, while maintaining the performance that enables widespread application of these systems. All algorithms developed in this research are applicable on already existing biometric authentication systems and do not require redesign of these existing, well established iris-based authentication systems that use binary templates.

Personal identity refers to a set of attributes (e.g., name, social insurance number, etc.) that are associated with a person. Identity management is the process of creating, maintaining and destroying identities of individuals in a population. Biometric technologies are technologies developed to use statistical analysis of an individual’s biological or behavioral traits to determine his identity. Biometrics based authentication systems offer a reliable solution for identity management, because of their uniqueness, relative stability over time and security (among other reasons). Public acceptance of biometric systems will depend on their ability to ensure robustness, accuracy and security. Although robustness and accuracy of such systems are rapidly improving, there still remain some issues of security and balancing it with privacy. While the uniqueness of biometric traits offers a convenient and reliable means of identification, it also poses the risk of unauthorized cross-referencing among databases using the same biometric trait. There is also a high risk in case of a biometric database being compromised, since it’s not possible to revoke the biometric trait and re-issue a new one as is the case with passwords and smart keys. This unique attribute of biometric based authentication system poses a challenge that might slow down public acceptance and the use of biometrics for authentication purposes in large scale applications. In this research we investigate the vulnerabilities of biometric systems focusing on template security in iris-based biometric recognition systems. The iris has been well studied for authentication purposes and has been proven accurate in large scale applications in several airports and border crossings around the world. The most widely accepted iris recognition systems are based on Daugman’s model that creates a binary iris template. In this research we develop different systems using watermarking, bio-cryptography as well as feature transformation to achieve revocability and security of binary templates in iris based biometric authentication systems, while maintaining the performance that enables widespread application of these systems. All algorithms developed in this research are applicable on already existing biometric authentication systems and do not require redesign of these existing, well established iris-based authentication systems that use binary templates.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:36:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 4594295 bytes, checksum: bd4f4df655903b796eb6cf79a5060ded (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-09-16 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A biometric system that employs one single biometric characteristic is constrained. This limitation can be reduced by fusing the information presented by multiple sources. A system that consolidates the evidence presented by multiple biometric sources is known as a multibiometric system. In such a context, this work proposes the security and persistence APIs of a multi-biometric architecture, which is capable of using one or more biometric modalities. In access control applications, a user might be forced to authenticate in order to give an unauthorized access to a criminal. As an alternative to this problem, the API uses a continuous authentication process, which verifies if the user identified at the start of the software application is still able to remain on the system, without human interferences or breaks in the process. Much of the literature on biometric system design has focused on system error rates and scaling equations. However, it is also important to have a solid foundation for future progress as the processes and systems architecture for the new biometric application are designed. Hence, the designed architecture made it possible to create a well-defined API for multibiometric systems, which may help developers to standardize, among other things, their data structure, in order to enable and facilitate templates fusion and interoperability. Therefore, the developed security and persistence APIs support a multi-biometric access control architecture. This architecture is extensible, that is, capable of easily comprising new biometric characteristics and processes, yet making it possible to use a template security mechanism. The APIs were designed and implemented. They were demonstrated by a prototype application, through which it was possible to conduct the test experiments. / Um sistema biométrico que empregue uma única peculiaridade ou traço característico é restrito. Esta limitação pode ser suavizada pela fusão dos dados apresentados por múltiplas fontes. Um sistema que consolida a evidência apresentada por múltiplas fontes biométricas é conhecido como um sistema multibiométrico. Nesse contexto, este trabalho propõe a interface de aplicação (API) de segurança e armazenamento de uma arquitetura multibiométrica, com habilidade de empregar uma ou mais modalidades biométricas. Em aplicações de controle de acesso, um usuário pode ser coagido a se autenticar para permitir um acesso indevido. Como alternativa para este problema, a API utiliza um processo de autenticação contínua, que verifica se o usuário que se identificou no início de uma aplicação de software ainda está apto a continuar no sistema, sem interferências humanas ou paralisações do processo. Grande parte da literatura sobre projeto de sistemas biométricos tem o foco nas taxas de erro do sistema e na simplificação de equações. No entanto, também é importante que se tenha uma base sólida para progressos futuros no momento em que os processos e a arquitetura da nova aplicação biométrica estiverem sendo projetados. Neste sentido, a arquitetura projetada permitiu a construção de uma API bem definida para sistemas multibiométricos, que deverá auxiliar os desenvolvedores a padronizar, entre outras coisas, sua estrutura de dados, de forma a possibilitar e facilitar a fusão de modelos biométricos e a interoperabilidade. Deste modo, a API de segurança e armazenamento desenvolvida suporta uma arquitetura multibiométrica de controle de acesso para autenticação contínua extensível, isto é, capaz de receber novas características e processos biométricos com facilidade, permitindo, ainda, o uso de um mecanismo de segurança de templates biométricos. A API foi projetada e implementada. Sua demonstração foi feita através de uma aplicação protótipo, por meio da qual foi possível realizar os testes.