Fingerprint shell: Secure representation of fingerprint template

• A new approach for fingerprint template protection is proposed.
• A new representation is used instead of the traditional minutiae-based representation.
• Requirements of revocability, diversity, security and performance are achieved.
• The approach is sufficiently robust to the zero effort and brute force attacks.

Fingerprint is a popular biometric modality which is used extensively in several applications for person authentication, providing high uniqueness and acceptable performance. Most fingerprint systems use minutiae-based representations. However, several studies have proven that the original fingerprint impression can be reconstructed from minutia information, which makes the problem of ensuring the security of fingerprint data very critical. In this paper, we present a new approach for fingerprint template protection. Our objective is to build a non-invertible transformation that meets the requirements of revocability, diversity, security and performance. In this context, we exploit the information provided by the extracted minutiae to construct a new representation based on special spiral curves, which can be used for the recognition task instead of the traditional minutiae-based representation. The proposed approach has been evaluated using the original FVC protocol and compared with existing protection approaches which use the same protocol. Our experimental results illustrate the ability of the proposed representation to preserve the performance of protected systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that the security of our approach is sufficiently robust to the zero effort and brute force attacks.