Key-binding mechanisms allow to use one’s biometric features as a universal digital key without having them ever stored anywhere. Security, ease of use and privacy concerns are addressed in one stroke. The best known proposal for such a mechanism, the Fingerprint Vault, treats biometric data as projections of a polynomial encoding the key. Its security is based on the difficulty of polynomial reconstruction. Here I propose a new key-binding mechanism based on associative pattern recall and making use of a totally different security principle, that of the difficulty of energy optimization of spin glasses. The idea is to exploit the mixed ferromagnetic and spin glass phase of the Hopfield neural network to encode the key as a local minimum configuration of the energy functional, ”lost” amidst the exponentially growing number of valleys and minima representing the spin glass. The correct fingerprint will be able to retrieve the key by dynamical evolution to the nearest attractor. Other fingerprints will be driven far away from the key. Known vulnerabilities of the Fingerprint Vault are eliminated by this new security principle.
[1]
Anil K. Jain,et al.
Biometric cryptosystems: issues and challenges
,
2004,
Proceedings of the IEEE.
[2]
Sharath Pankanti,et al.
Guide to Biometrics
,
2003,
Springer Professional Computing.
[3]
Sharath Pankanti,et al.
Fuzzy Vault for Fingerprints
,
2005,
AVBPA.
[4]
T.E. Boult,et al.
Cracking Fuzzy Vaults and Biometric Encryption
,
2007,
2007 Biometrics Symposium.
[5]
N. Kiyavash,et al.
Secure Smartcard-Based Fingerprint Authentication ∗
,
2003
.
[6]
S. Kirkpatrick,et al.
Infinite-ranged models of spin-glasses
,
1978
.
[7]
Madhu Sudan,et al.
A Fuzzy Vault Scheme
,
2006,
Des. Codes Cryptogr..
[8]
Fabián A. Chudak,et al.
Investigating the performance of an adiabatic quantum optimization processor
,
2010,
Quantum Inf. Process..
[9]
Wolfgang Banzhaf,et al.
Finding the Global Minimum of a Low-Dimensional Spin-Glass Model
,
1989,
Parallelism, Learning, Evolution.
[10]
V. Dotsenko.
Neural networks: translation-, rotation- and scale-invariant pattern recognition
,
1988
.