Privacy Protecting Biometric Authentication Systems

There is an increased concern over the loss of privacy and potential misuse of biometric data held in central repositories. The major concerns are about the use of biometrics to track people, the non- revocability of biometrics (if compromised they can not be canceled or reissued), and disclosure of sensitive information such as race and health problems. The suggestion of keeping the biometric data in a user owned token does not completely solve the problem, as malicious users can claim that their token is broken to avoid biometric verification. Overall, these concerns brought the need for privacy preserving biometric authentication methods in the recent years. This book analyses existing privacy preserving biometric systems and provides a novel framework, which combines multiple biometric traits to obtain a multi-biometric template that hides the constituent biometrics and allows the possibility of creating non-unique identifiers for a person, such that linking separate template databases is impossible. The book should be a useful reference for those interested in a contemporary technology to remedy privacy issues raised by the widespread of biometric systems.