1 Privacy in Biometrics

Biometric features are increasingly used for authentication and identification purposes in a broad variety of institutional and commercial systems, such as e-government, e-banking and e-commerce applications. On the other side, the adoption of biometric techniques is restrained by a rising concern regarding the protection of the biometrics templates. In fact, people are not generally keen to give out biometric traits with little assurance that they cannot be stolen or used without an expressed consent. Recent results showed that generating a unique identifier by combining biometric traits making it impossible to recover the original biometric features (thus preserving the privacy of the biometric traits) is feasible. The chapter reviews the privacy issues related to the use of biometrics and presents some of the most advanced techniques available up to date, providing a comparative analysis. and giving an overview on future trends. 1.