Biometrics based key management of double random phase encoding scheme using error control codes

In this paper, an optical security system has been proposed in which key of the double random phase encoding technique is linked to the biometrics of the user to make it user specific. The error in recognition due to the biometric variation is corrected by encoding the key using the BCH code. A user specific shuffling key is used to increase the separation between genuine and impostor Hamming distance distribution. This shuffling key is then further secured using the RSA public key encryption to enhance the security of the system. XOR operation is performed between the encoded key and the feature vector obtained from the biometrics. The RSA encoded shuffling key and the data obtained from the XOR operation are stored into a token. The main advantage of the present technique is that the key retrieval is possible only in the simultaneous presence of the token and the biometrics of the user which not only authenticates the presence of the original input but also secures the key of the system. Computational experiments showed the effectiveness of the proposed technique for key retrieval in the decryption process by using the live biometrics of the user.