Secret Sharing Scheme for Securing Biometric Template

ABSTRACT

Identity theft is a growing concern in this age of digital technology and applications. Traditional authentication methods such as passwords, passphrases, identity documents etc. are not suffi­cient to combat this menace. Biometrics lends itself as a better and alternative security measure to fight this problem. However, a major challenge to biometric system is the insecurity of biometric templates stored in the database. As a panacea to the vulnerability of templates stored in the database, we proposed a visual secret sharing scheme for images otherwise known as visual cryptography, such that what is stored is a noise like extracted feature of the template. The subject whose biometric data is being processed also hold a noise like portion of the template. Compromise through attacks on the database becomes difficult without the cooperation of the subject under investigations.

KEYWORDS: database, identity theft, secret sharing , security, template.