A Secure Fingerprint Transmission Protocol for Insecure Communication Channels

A fingerprint is a recognizable pattern of ridges and valleys on a person’s finger surface. A person’s fingerprints are distinct and unchangeable throughout a person’s life unless distorted through external injury. The fingerprint is one of the most commonly utilized biometric identification techniques. As fingerprints are used in realistic authentication, securing fingerprints is a paramount concern. Moreover, enciphering the whole fingerprint image collected through a fingerprint scanner would require extensive computation. Research has shown that minutiae points are used to determine the uniqueness of a fingerprint. A method is proposed to store and transmit fingerprint data securely. The proposed technique enciphers only the internal angles subtended by the relevant minutiae points and the information about the type of minutiae points. The proposed techniques reduce the computation involved as only the internal angles information and type of minutiae points are enciphered rather than the whole scanned fingerprint image. Statistical and security analyses conducted on the cipher data suggest the proposed encryption is secure. A digital signature is incorporated while transmitting the fingerprint information, thereby maintaining the data integrity.