An Efficient Selective Encryption of Fingerprint Images for Embedded Processors

Biometric-based authentication can provide a strong security guarantee of the identity of users. However, the security of biometric data is particularly important as any compromise of the biometric data will be permanent. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient protocol to transmit fingerprint images from a fingerprint sensor to a client by exploiting the characteristics of the fingerprint images. Because the fingerprint sensor is computationally limited, a standard encryption algorithm may not be applied to the full fingerprint images in real-time to guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of the fingerprint images transmitted. To reduce the computational workload on the resource-constrained sensor, we apply the encryption algorithm to a nonce for integrity and to a specific bitplane of each pixel of the fingerprint image for confidentiality. Experimental results show that the integrity and confidentiality of the fingerprint images can be guaranteed without any leakage of the fingerprint ridge information and can be completed in real-time on embedded processors.