Improved fuzzy vault scheme for fingerprint verification

Fuzzy vault is a well-known technique to address the privacy concerns in biometric identification applications. We revisit the fuzzy vault scheme to address implementation, efficiency, and security issues encountered in its realization. We use the fingerprint data as a case study. We compare the performances of two different methods used in the implementation of fuzzy vault, namely brute force and Reed Solomon decoding. We show that the locations of fake (chaff) points in the vault leak information on the genuine points and propose a new chaff point placement technique that makes distinguishing genuine points impossible. We also propose a novel method for creation of chaff points that decreases the success rate of the brute force attack from 100% to less than 3.5%. While this paper lays out a complete guideline as to how the fuzzy vault is implemented in an efficient and secure way, it also points out that more research is needed to thwart the proposed attacks by presenting ideas for future research.