Effective Combination of Iris-based Cancelable Biometrics and Biometric Cryptosystems

The fuzzy commitment scheme (FCS) is one of the most effective biometric cryptosystems (BCs) that provide secure management of cryptographic keys using biometric templates. In this scheme, error correcting codes (ECCs) are firstly employed to encode a cryptographic key into a codeword which is then secured via linking (committing) it with a biometric template of the same length. Unfortunately, the key length is constrained by the size of the adopted biometric template as well as the employed ECC(s). In this paper, we propose a secure iris template protection scheme that combines cancelable biometrics with the FCS in order to secure long cryptographic keys without sacrificing the recognition accuracy. First, we utilize cancelable biometrics to derive revocable templates of large sizes from the most reliable bits in iris codes. Then, the FCS is applied to the obtained cancelable iris templates to secure cryptographic keys of the desired length. The revocability of cryptographic keys as well as true iris templates is guaranteed due to the hybridization of both techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid system can achieve high recognition accuracy regardless of the key size.