The fuzzy vault
The fuzzy vault scheme [10] obtains its advantages through thinking of a codeword as
an evaluation of a polynomial over a set of points. The intuition can be introduced by the
following motivational example.
Presume two parties, a prover A and a verifier B. The
prover A wants to find someone who shares her taste in movies without revealing her
preferences. For this purpose she compiles a set k of her favorite movies and encodes
her secret telephone number as a polynomial. The set k is treated as a witness to lock the
committed secret telephone number, yielding a fuzzy vault. The fuzzy
vault is published and allows another party, the verifier B, to compare his movie set
with the one concealed in the vault. In case A and B have similar but not identical taste
of movies, the verifier B will succeed in unlocking the vault and obtain the telephone
number of A. On the other hand, anyone who tries to unlock with a set of movies
differing substantially from the favorites of A, will fail. The vault construction thus
ensures restricted access to the movie set and telephone number.
The possibility that the witnesses are sets that may be arbitrarily ordered, i.e. true
sets rather than sequences, distinguishes Juels and Sudan’s scheme from prior work.
Their framework is applicable in circumstances where order cannot be imposed to input
data and exactitude represents a drawback. This capability assigns the fuzzy vault the
crucial distinction to constitute a biometric cryptosystem. The fuzzy vault scheme of
Juels and Sudan provides a framework to lock a secret value using an unordered witness
set of locking elements, such that someone who possesses a substantial amount of the
locking elements will be capable of unlocking the secret. The security concept is based
on the difficulty of the polynomial reconstruction problem.
The multiple control fuzzy vault
Current biometric cryptosystems rely on Juels and Sudan’s fuzzy vault concept which
restricts its employment to only one applicant or one biometric trait. Extending the
“single control” fuzzy vault to a “multiple control” tool not only generalizes the construction
but also allows the addition of structured secret access control into the original
fuzzy vault.
In particular threshold, compartmented and hierarchical access structures
contribute significant new application opportunities. Those include scenarios applying
multimodal biometric applications or shared biometric access control without requiring
storage of unprotected biometric datasets. Systems based on our constructions offer
flexibility to choose amongst different biometric traits according to the environment.
The proposed construction of a
multiple control scheme can be
implemented with all biometric traits. The employed multiple control structure has been inspired by Shamir’s
secret sharing scheme and the fuzzy vault. Within the paper the locking and unlocking of a multiple control
fuzzy vault differentiating amongst three access structures for secret reveal and concealment will be exampled.
The security and legitimate complexity will be delved into allowing a better
insight of achievements, constraints and improvements in comparison to the single control
framework. The presentation of the multiple control fuzzy vault has been kept on a
general basis to allow ease of adoption using a variety of biometrics employed for the
locking and unlocking.
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