Attacks on biometric systems: a case study in fingerprints

In spite of numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems based on token or knowledge, they are vulnerable to attacks that can decrease their security considerably. In this paper, we analyze these attacks in the realm of a fingerprint biometric system. We propose an attack system that uses a hill climbing procedure to synthesize the target minutia templates and evaluate its feasibility with extensive experimental results conducted on a large fingerprint database. Several measures that can be utilized to decrease the probability of such attacks and their ramifications are also presented.

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