Return to search

Security, Privacy and Performance Improvements for Fuzzy Extractors

With the usage of biometrics becoming commonly used in a variety of applications, keeping those biometrics private and secure is an important issue. Indeed, the convenience of using biometrics for authentication is counteracted by the fact that they cannot easily be modified or changed. This can have dire consequences to a person if their biometrics are leaked.

In the past decades, various techniques have been proposed to solve this problem. Such techniques range from using and storing randomized templates, using homomorphic encryption, or using biometric encryption techniques such as fuzzy extractors. Fuzzy extractors are a construction that allows the extraction of cryptographic keys from noisy data like biometrics. The key can then be rebuilt from some helper data and another biometric, provided that it is similar enough to the biometrics used to generate the key. This can be achieved through various approaches like the use of a quantizer or an error correcting code.

In this thesis, we consider specifically fuzzy extractors for facial images. The first part of this thesis focuses on improving the security, privacy and performance of the extractor for faces first proposed by Sutcu et al. Our improvements make their construction more resistant to partial and total leaks of secure information, as well as improve the performance in a biometric authentication setting.

The second part looks at using low density lattice codes (LDLC) as a quantizer in the fuzzy extractor, instead of using component based quantization. Although LDLC have been proposed as a quantizer for a general fuzzy extractor, they have yet to be used or tested for continuous biometrics like face images. We present a construction for a fuzzy extractor scheme using LDLC and we analyze its performance on a publicly available data set of images. Using an LDLC quantizer on this data set has lower accuracy than the improved scheme from the first part of this thesis. On the other hand, the LDLC scheme performs better when the inputs have additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), as we show through simulated data. As such, we expect it to perform well in general on data and biometrics with variance akin to a AWGN channel.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40606
Date08 June 2020
CreatorsBrien, Renaud
ContributorsAdams, Carlisle
PublisherUniversité d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Source SetsUniversité d’Ottawa
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Formatapplication/pdf

Page generated in 0.0019 seconds