Biometric masterkeys

Biometric authentication is used to secure digital or physical access. Such an authentication system uses a biometric database, where data are sometimes protected by cancelable transformations. This paper introduces the notion of biometric masterkeys. A masterkey is a feature vector such that the corresponding template matches with a significant number of templates stored in a cancelable biometric database. Such a masterkey is directly researched from a cancelable biometric database, but we also investigate another scenario in which the masterkey is fixed before the creation of the cancelable biometric database, providing additional access rights in the system for the masterkey’s owner. Experimental results are realized on three biometric databases: the fingerprint database FVC, the face image database LFW and the ECG database PTB. It shows the effectiveness and the efficiency of such masterkeys in both scenarios. In particular, from any given feature vector, we are able to construct a cancelable biometric database, for which the biometric template matches with all the templates of the database.