Efficient Privacy-Preserving Fingerprint-Based Authentication System Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract EN

To help smartphone users protect their phone, fingerprint-based authentication systems (e.g., Apple’s Touch ID) have increasingly become popular in smartphones.

In web applications, however, fingerprint-based authentication is still rarely used.

One of the most serious concerns is the lack of technology for securely storing fingerprint data used for authentication.

Because scanned fingerprint data are not exactly the same each time, the use of a traditional cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) is infeasible to protect raw fingerprint data.

In this paper, we present an efficient privacy-preserving fingerprint authentication system using a fully homomorphic encryption scheme in which fingerprint data are always stored and processed in an encrypted form.

We implement a fully working fingerprint authentication system with a fingerprint database (containing 4,000 samples) using the Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (TFHE) library.

The proposed system can perform the fingerprint matching process within about 166 seconds (±0.564 seconds) on average.