Secure remote authentication using biometric data

Abstract. Biometric data offer a potential source of high-entropy, secret information that can be used in cryptographic protocols provided two issues are addressed: (1) biometric data are not uniformly distributed; and (2) they are not exactly reproducible. Recent work, most notably that of Dodis, Reyzin, and Smith, has shown how these obstacles may be overcome by allowing some auxiliary public information to be reliably sent from a server to the human user. Subsequent work of Boyen has shown how to extend these techniques, in the random oracle model, to enable unidirectional authentication from the user to the server without the assumption of a reliable communication channel. We show two efficient techniques enabling the use of biometric data to achieve mutual authentication or authenticated key exchange over a completely insecure (i.e., adversarially controlled) channel. In addition to achieving stronger security guarantees than the work of Boyen, we improve upon his solution in a number of other respects: we tolerate a broader class of errors and, in one case, improve upon the parameters of his solution and give a proof of security in the standard model. 1 Using Biometric Data for Secure Authentication Biometric data, as a potential source of high-entropy, secret information, have been suggested as a way to enable strong, cryptographically-secure authentication of human users without requiring them to remember or store traditional cryptographic keys. Before such data can be used in existing cryptographic protocols, however, two issues must be addressed: first, biometric data are not uniformly distributed and hence do not offer provable security guarantees if use