Tamper-Resistant Biometric IDs

We present FaceCerts, a simple, inexpensive, and cryptographically secure identity certification system. A FaceCert is a printout of person’s portrait photo, an arbitrary textual message, and a 2-D color barcode which encodes an RSA signature of the message hash and the compressed representation of the face encompassed by the photo. The signature is created using the private key of the party issuing the ID. ID verification is performed by a simple off-line scanning device that contains the public key of the issuer. The system does not require smart cards; it can be expanded to encompass other biometric features, and more interestingly, the ID does not need to be printed by a trusted or high-end printer, it can be printed anywhere, anytime, and potentially by anyone. The ID verifier uses a single scan process which does not require the use of displays. We detail system’s components and present a preliminary performance evaluation using an in-field experiment.