A multi-biometric verification system for the privacy protection of iris templates

Biometric systems have been recently developed and used for authentication or identification in several scenarios, ranging from institutional purposes (border control) to commercial applications (point of sale). Two main issues are raised when such systems are applied: reliability and privacy for users. Multi-biometric systems, i.e. systems involving more than a biometric trait, increase the security of the system, but threaten users’ privacy, which are compelled to release an increased amount of sensible information. In this paper, we propose a multi-biometric system, which allows the extraction of secure identifiers and ensures that the stored information does not compromise the privacy of users’ biometrics. Furthermore, we show the practicality of our approach, by describing an effective construction, based on the combination of two iris templates and we present the resulting experimental data.