Attacks via record multiplicity on cancelable biometrics templates

Various template protection techniques have been developed in the past few years, among which cancelable biometrics is a very popular and efficient one. It uses a noninvertible transformation to map an original template to a transformed domain to prevent the recovery of the original template from a compromised transformed template. Generally, cross-template attacks over cancellable template schemes are evaluated through statistic independence metrics. In this paper, we investigate approaches to launch attacks through cryptanalysis. Four typical cancelable fingerprint template design algorithms have been investigated by applying the attack via record multiplicity attack to retrieve the original template. Concrete attack examples are also given to make the demonstration more intuitive and comprehensive. The results show that all of them are vulnerable if an attacker can obtain multiple transformed templates and their corresponding transformation parameters. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 14 January 2013; Revised 10 March 2013; Accepted 6 April 2013