Biometric Template Security Using Fuzzy Vault

Fingerprint biometric is used by forensic department in identifying criminals because of its uniqueness. The criminal record (Fingerprint template) should be protected from creation of physical spoof and replacement by imposter's template to gain unauthorized access. Due to these reasons, fool-proof techniques are required for securely storing the criminal fingerprint records. Fuzzy vault is a cryptographic construct that is designed to work with biometric features represented as an unordered set like minutiae points. Template protection is done by transformation based approaches and biometric cryptosystems. During transformation template is stored in a transformed form so that the original biometric template cannot be easily recovered. Additional attributes like local ridge orientation and ridge frequency extracted from a minutia’s neighborhood is used to improve the fuzzy vault. A polynomial is evaluated using a secret key which is known only to the person who maintains the database of criminal records.