Biometric Template Security

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. The authors 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, they focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued.