In this paper, we consider the problem of incorporating privacy protection in a biometric access control system. An Anonymous Biometric Access Control (ABAC) system is proposed to verify the membership status of a user using biometric signals without knowing his or her true identity. This system is useful in protecting the privacy of authorized users while keeping out potential imposters and attackers. In our proposed system, we employ homomorphic encryption to protect the probe biometric and propose a Secure Similarity Search (SSS) algorithm to authenticate the probe in an anonymous way. We demonstrate our proposed system using a gallery of iris biometrics and show the efficiency of the implemented anonymous biometric matching performed in encrypted domain.
Ying Luo, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Shuiming Ye