The disruptive technology of blockchain can deliver secure solutions without the need for a central authority. In blockchain, assets that belong to a participant are controlled through the private key of an asymmetric key pair that is owned by the participant. Although, this lets blockchain network participants to have sovereignty on their assets, it comes with the responsibility of managing their own keys. Currently, there exists two major bottlenecks in managing keys; @math users don't have an efficient and secure way to store their keys, @math no efficient recovery mechanism exists in case the keys are lost. In this study, we propose secure methods to efficiently store and recover keys. For the first, we introduce an efficient encryption mechanism to securely encrypt and decrypt the private key using the owner's biometric signature. For the later, we introduce an efficient recovery mechanism using biometrics and secret sharing scheme. By applying the proposed key encryption and recovery mechanism, asset owners are able to securely store their keys on their devices and recover the keys in case they are lost.
@cite_35: Establishing identity is becoming critical in our vastly interconnected society. Questions such as "Is she really who she claims to be?," "Is this person authorized to use this facility?," or "Is he in the watchlist posted by the government?" are routinely being posed in a variety of scenarios ranging from issuing a driver's license to gaining entry into a country. The need for reliable user authentication techniques has increased in the wake of heightened concerns about security and rapid advancements in networking, communication, and mobility. Biometrics, described as the science of recognizing an individual based on his or her physical or behavioral traits, is beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate method for determining an individual's identity. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various commercial, civilian, and forensic applications as a means of establishing identity. In this paper, we provide an overview of biometrics and discuss some of the salient research issues that need to be addressed for making biometric technology an effective tool for providing information security. The primary contribution of this overview includes: 1) examining applications where biometric scan solve issues pertaining to information security; 2) enumerating the fundamental challenges encountered by biometric systems in real-world applications; and 3) discussing solutions to address the problems of scalability and security in large-scale authentication systems.
@cite_26: In this paper, the fundamental insecurities hampering a scalable, wide-spread deployment of biometric authentication are examined, and a cryptosystem capable of using fingerprint data as its key is presented. For our application, we focus on situations where a private key stored on a smartcard is used for authentication in a networked environment, and we assume an attacker can launch o -line attacks against a stolen card.Juels and Sudan's fuzzy vault is used as a starting point for building and analyzing a secure authentication scheme using fingerprints and smartcards called a figerprint vault. Fingerprint minutiae coordinates mi are encoded as elements in a nite eld F and the secret key is encoded in a polynomial f(x) over F[x]. The polynomial is evaluated at the minutiae locations, and the pairs (mi, f(mi)) are stored along with random (ci, di) cha points such that di ≠ f(ci). Given a matching fingerprint, a valid user can seperate out enough true points from the cha points to reconstruct f(x), and hence the original secret key.The parameters of the vault are selected such that the attacker's vault unlocking complexity is maximized, subject to zero unlocking complexity with a matching fingerprint and a reasonable amount of error. For a feature location measurement variance of 9 pixels, the optimal vault is 269 times more difficult to unlock for an attacker compared to a user posessing a matching fingerprint, along with approximately a 30 chance of unlocking failure.
@cite_1: A major new professional reference work on fingerprint security systems and technology from leading international researchers in the field. Handbook provides authoritative and comprehensive coverage of all major topics, concepts, and methods for fingerprint security systems. This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators.
@cite_2: Advances in the field of Information Technology also make Information Security an inseparable part of it. In order to deal with security, Authentication plays an important role. This paper presents a review on the biometric authentication techniques and some future possibilities in this field. In biometrics, a human being needs to be identified based on some characteristic physiological parameters. A wide variety of systems require reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user, and not anyone else. By using biometrics it is possible to confirm or establish an individual’s identity. The position of biometrics in the current field of Security has been depicted in this work. We have also outlined opinions about the usability of biometric authentication systems, comparison between different techniques and their advantages and disadvantages in this paper.
@cite_15: Because biometrics-based authentication offers several advantages over other authentication methods, there has been a significant surge in the use of biometrics for user authentication in recent years. It is important that such biometrics-based authentication systems be designed to withstand attacks when employed in security-critical applications, especially in unattended remote applications such as e-commerce. In this paper we outline the inherent strengths of biometrics-based authentication, identify the weak links in systems employing biometrics-based authentication, and present new solutions for eliminating some of these weak links. Although, for illustration purposes, fingerprint authentication is used throughout, our analysis extends to other biometrics-based methods.
provided a review on biometric authentication technologies @cite_2 . They found that fingerprint based systems had 2 The study of also stated that indexing structure of iris surpass indexing structure of fingerprint. According to their study, in multi-modal approach, the hit rate was improved up to 99.8 Smart card based biometric user authentication schemes have also been proposed @cite_26 . The biometric data and keys are stored in a smart card for regeneration of keys in the future. However, smart card based approaches have portability issues as carrying physical card is an additional burden. Also if compromised, they pose security threats for biometric data. Fingerprint technology provides very accurate results @cite_15 . Also, Jain et. al claimed that no biometric data is better than the other traits because all have own strengths and weaknesses, and performance of biometric data selection related with the type of application @cite_35 . However, the matching accuracy of the fingerprint has been shown to be very high @cite_1 .