A wide variety of systems requires reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user and no one else. Examples of such applications include secure access to buildings, computer systems, laptops, cellular phones, and ATMs. In the absence of robust personal recognition schemes, these systems are vulnerable to the wiles of an impostor. Biometric recognition, or, simply, biometrics, refers to the automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. By using biometrics, it is possible to confirm or establish an individual's identity based on "who she is", rather than by "what she possesses" (e.g., an ID card) or "what she remembers" (e.g., a password). We give a brief overview of the field of biometrics and summarize some of its advantages, disadvantages, strengths, limitations, and related privacy concerns.

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An introduction to biometric recognition

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

Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society.

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Biometric template security

Establishing identity is becoming critical in our vastly interconnected society. Questions such as "Is she really who she claims to be?," "Is this person authorized to use this facility?," or "Is he in the watchlist posted by the government?" are routinely being posed in a variety of scenarios ranging from issuing a driver's license to gaining entry into a country. The need for reliable user authentication techniques has increased in the wake of heightened concerns about security and rapid advancements in networking, communication, and mobility. Biometrics, described as the science of recognizing an individual based on his or her physical or behavioral traits, is beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate method for determining an individual's identity. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various commercial, civilian, and forensic applications as a means of establishing identity. In this paper, we provide an overview of biometrics and discuss some of the salient research issues that need to be addressed for making biometric technology an effective tool for providing information security. The primary contribution of this overview includes: 1) examining applications where biometric scan solve issues pertaining to information security; 2) enumerating the fundamental challenges encountered by biometric systems in real-world applications; and 3) discussing solutions to address the problems of scalability and security in large-scale authentication systems.

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Biometrics: a tool for information security

Biometrics offers greater security and convenience than traditional methods of personal recognition. In some applications, biometrics can replace or supplement the existing technology. In others, it is the only viable approach. But how secure is biometrics? And what are the privacy implications?.

Biometric recognition: security and privacy concerns

Potential threats caused by something like real fingers, which are called fake or artificial fingers, should be crucial for authentication based on fingerprint systems. Security evaluation against attacks using such artificial fingers has been rarely disclosed. Only in patent literature, measures, such as live and well detection, against fake fingers have been proposed. However, the providers of fingerprint systems usually do not mention whether or not these measures are actually implemented in emerging fingerprint systems for PCs or smart cards or portable terminals, which are expected to enhance the grade of personal authentication necessary for digital transactions. As researchers who are pursuing secure systems, we would like to discuss attacks using artificial fingers and conduct experimental research to clarify the reality. This paper reports that gummy fingers, namely artificial fingers that are easily made of cheap and readily available gelatin, were accepted by extremely high rates by 11 particular fingerprint devices with optical or capacitive sensors. We have used the molds, which we made by pressing our live fingers against them or by processing fingerprint images from prints on glass surfaces, etc. We describe how to make the molds, and then show that the gummy fingers, which are made with these molds, can fool the fingerprint devices.

Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems.

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Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems

A thermal ink layer (102) formed by a thermochromic material changing from a black color to a transparent state when heated is arranged on a base (101) which is a PET film. A choresteric liquid crystal layer (103) in which an appropriate pattern of hologram (105) is formed is arranged on the thermal ink layer (102). At room temperature, the thermal ink layer (102) exhibits the light absorption characteristic and the selective reflection characteristic and it is possible to observe the color shift characteristic of the choresteric liquid crystal layer (103). When heated, the thermal ink layer (102) becomes transparent and the pattern (104) on the base (101) is further observed in the superimposed state. By utilizing the change of the view, it is possible to authenticate a commodity. This realizes a higher level for preventing forgery than the conventional discrimination technique and enables a user to easily and surely judge whether a commodity is a forged one.

Discrimination medium and discrimination method therefor

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a technique having a higher forgery preventing level than a discrimination technique using a conventional technique and capable of facilitate discrimination to certainly perform the same. SOLUTION: A heat-sensitive change ink layer 102 constituted of a thermochromic material changing from black to transparency by heating is provided on a base material 101 being a PET film and a cholesteric liquid crystal layer 103 having a proper pattern hologram 105 formed thereon is further arranged thereon. The heat-sensitive ink layer 102 shows light absorbability at the normal temperature and the selective reflection characteristics and color shift characteristics of the cholesteric liquid crystal layer 103 are observed. When the heat-sensitive ink layer 102 is heated, it becomes transparent and the pattern 104 on the base material 101 looks like a further overlapped state. The change of this way to look is utilized to judge genuineness. COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI

Discrimination medium and its discriminating method

Diffraction gratings and liquid crystals are used as security features for document protection. We have studied the combination of these two features and have developed an optically variable device which is called CPLgram. CPLgram is made of thin film of high polymer cholesteric liquid crystals which exhibit diffraction of light. The combination of diffraction gratings and cholesteric liquid crystals provides light diffraction, wavelength selectivity, color-shifting of reflection and circular polarization selectivity, for the device. These characteristics make it very difficult to counterfeit the devices. In our understanding, it is a new approach to combine these security features. The most striking characteristic of the combination is that diffracted light with both a particular wavelength and a particular direction of circular polarization is obtainable. Another significant aspect of the combination is that customers can choose a device verification method from three types of methods depending on security requirements and/or cost demands; to examine the device (a) with the naked eye, (b) with a simple (and inexpensive) inspection tool, and (c) by verification equipment.

Hiroyuki Matsumoto

Papers

Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems.

Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems

Discrimination medium and discrimination method therefor

Discrimination medium and its discriminating method

CPLgram : an advanced machine readable OVD that is obtained by combining diffraction gratings and liquid crystals