A major new professional reference work on fingerprint security systems and technology from leading international researchers in the field Handbook provides authoritative and comprehensive coverage of all major topics, concepts, and methods for fingerprint security systems This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators

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Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition

We introduce a new type of Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) scheme that we call Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption. In Fuzzy IBE we view an identity as set of descriptive attributes. A Fuzzy IBE scheme allows for a private key for an identity, ω, to decrypt a ciphertext encrypted with an identity, ω ′, if and only if the identities ω and ω ′ are close to each other as measured by the “set overlap” distance metric. A Fuzzy IBE scheme can be applied to enable encryption using biometric inputs as identities; the error-tolerance property of a Fuzzy IBE scheme is precisely what allows for the use of biometric identities, which inherently will have some noise each time they are sampled. Additionally, we show that Fuzzy-IBE can be used for a type of application that we term “attribute-based encryption”.

In this paper we present two constructions of Fuzzy IBE schemes. Our constructions can be viewed as an Identity-Based Encryption of a message under several attributes that compose a (fuzzy) identity. Our IBE schemes are both error-tolerant and secure against collusion attacks. Additionally, our basic construction does not use random oracles. We prove the security of our schemes under the Selective-ID security model.

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Fuzzy identity-based encryption

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Fuzzy Identity Based Encryption.

We provide formal definitions and efficient secure techniques for 


turning biometric information into keys usable for any cryptographic application, and


reliably and securely authenticating biometric data.

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Fuzzy extractors: How to generate strong keys from biometrics and other noisy data

We combine well-known techniques from the areas of error-correcting codes and cryptography to achieve a new type of cryptographic primitive that we refer to as a fuzzy commitment scheme. Like a conventional cryptographic commitment scheme, our fuzzy commitment scheme is both concealing and binding: it is infeasible for an attacker to learn the committed value, and also for the committer to decommit a value in more than one way. In a conventional scheme, a commitment must be opened using a unique witness, which acts, essentially, as a decryption key. By contrast, our scheme is fuzzy in the sense that it accepts a witness that is close to the original encrypting witness in a suitable metric, but not necessarily identical.This characteristic of our fuzzy commitment scheme makes it useful for applications such as biometric authentication systems, in which data is subject to random noise. Because the scheme is tolerant of error, it is capable of protecting biometric data just as conventional cryptographic techniques, like hash functions, are used to protect alphanumeric passwords. This addresses a major outstanding problem in the theory of biometric authentication. We prove the security characteristics of our fuzzy commitment scheme relative to the properties of an underlying cryptographic hash function.

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A fuzzy commitment scheme

In developing secure applications and systems, designers must often incorporate secure user identification in the design specification. In this paper, we study secure off-line authenticated user identification schemes based on a biometric system that can measure a user's biometrics accurately (up to some Hamming distance). The presented schemes enhance identification and authorization in secure applications by binding a biometric template with authorization information on a token such as a magnetic strip. Also developed are schemes specifically designed to minimize the compromising of a user's private biometrics data, encapsulated in the authorization information, without requiring secure hardware tokens. We also study the feasibility of biometrics performing as an enabling technology for secure systems and applications design. We investigate a new technology which allows a user's biometrics to facilitate cryptographic mechanisms.

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On enabling secure applications through off-line biometric identification

A new cryptosystem that is suitable for database encryption is presented. The system has the important property of having subkeys that allow the encryption and decryption of fields within a record. The system is based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem.

A database encryption system with subkeys

In this paper we present a system for protecting the privacy of cryptograms to avoid detection by censors. The system transforms ciphertext into innocuous text which can be transformed back into the original ciphertext. The expandable set of tools allows experimentation with custom dictionaries, automatic simulation of writing style, and the use of Context-Free-Grammars to control text generation. The scope of this paper is to provide an overview of the basic transformation processes and to demonstrate the quality of the generated text.

Hiding the Hidden: A software system for concealing ciphertext as innocuous text

The author describes the use of cryptographic authentication for controlling computer viruses. The objective is to protect against viruses infecting software distributions, updates, and programs stored or executed on a system. The authentication determines the source and integrity of an executable, relying on the source to produce virus-free software. The scheme relies on a trusted (and verifiable, where possible) device, the authenticator, used to authenticate and update programs and convert programs between the various formats. In addition, each user's machine uses a similar device to perform run-time checking. >

Defending systems against viruses through cryptographic authentication

Several automated techniques exist to transform ciphertext into text that "looks like" natural-language text while retaining the ability to recover the original ciphertext. This transformation changes the ciphertext so that it doesn't attract undue attention from, for example, attackers or agencies or organizations that might want to detect or censor encrypted communication. Although it is relatively easy to generate a small sample of quality text, it is challenging to be able to generate large texts that are "meaningful" to a human reader and which appear innocuous.This paper expands on a previous approach that used sentence models and large dictionaries of words classified by part-of-speech [7]. By using an "extensible contextual template" approach combined with a synonymbased replacement strategy, much more realistic text is generated than was possible with NICETEXT.

George I. Davida

Papers

On enabling secure applications through off-line biometric identification

A database encryption system with subkeys

Hiding the Hidden: A software system for concealing ciphertext as innocuous text

Defending systems against viruses through cryptographic authentication

A Practical and Effective Approach to Large-Scale Automated Linguistic Steganography