Wolf Attack Probability: A New Security Measure in Biometric Authentication Systems

This paper will propose a wolf attack probability (WAP) as a new measure for evaluating security of biometric authentication systems. The wolf attack is an attempt to impersonate a victim by feeding “wolves” into the system to be attacked. The “wolf” means an input value which can be falsely accepted as a match with multiple templates. WAP is defined as a maximum success probability of the wolf attack with one wolf sample. In this paper, we give a rigorous definition of the new security measure which gives strengh estimation of an individual biometric authentication system against impersonation attacks. We show that if one reestimates using our WAP measure, a typical fingerprint algorithm is turned out to be much weaker than theoretically estimated by Ratha et al. Moreover, we apply the wolf attack to a finger-vein-pattern matching algorithm. Surprisingly, we show that there exists an extremely strong wolf which falsely matches all templates for any threshold values.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICB
• Authors: Masashi Une, Akira Otsuka, Hideki Imai
• Keywords: Biometric Authentication, ICB 2007, Wolf Attack, Wolf Attack Probability