Energy-Efficient Transmissions of Fingerprint Images Using Both Encryption and Fingerprinting Techniques

Abstract

As user authentication by using biometric information such as fingerprint has been widely accepted, there has been a growing interest in protecting the biometric information itself against external attackers. Especially, as the mobile handheld devices equipped with fingerprint sensors are produced, it becomes important to protect the private information of an user(i.e., fingerprint image) in the remote applications. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient technique to transmit fingerprint images from the handheld device to a server securely using both encryption and fingerprinting. In addition to the encryption to guarantee the confidentiality of the fingerprint image transmitted, we insert the logo of the application into the fingerprint image(i.e., fingerprinting) to indicate to whom the fingerprint image is transmitted(i.e., a possible privacy violator). In particular, to lower the computational burden of the handheld device, we not only offload some heavy computation to the server without compromising the security, but also apply some techniques to the handheld device such as loop transformation and data compaction. Based on experimental results, we confirm that our technique can transmit fingerprint images from the handheld device in an energy-efficient way(by a factor of 2) and detect the intentional/unintentional leakage of the transmitted fingerprint image from the server – privacy violator.