An efficient and lightweight multi‐scroll chaos‐based hardware solution for protecting fingerprint biometric templates

Summary This paper presents a new efficient and lightweight approach for enhancing the security of biometric models, namely, fingerprint templates, against possible attacks. The proposed design is based on Vernam stream cipher in which the key generator is designed in the hardware manner. The designed cryptosystem consists of using multi‐scroll chaotic system that is characterized by a large key space and can be generated N×N grid multi‐scroll attractors, with a good behavior of chaotic dynamic. The hardware approach is carried out through describing Euler method by VHDL. Field‐programmable gate array (FPGA) experimental results validate the developed architecture while still providing a good compromise between hardware resources and performance. Indeed, security analysis also shows that the designed encryption algorithm is robust against statistical, brute force, and entropy attacks. Therefore, it can be considered as a lightweight security solution, which could be very useful in many embedded applications namely securing biometric authentication systems. This work presents a new efficient and lightweight multi‐scroll chaos‐based stream cipher for enhancing the security of an authentication fingerprint system. The encryption and decryption processes are implemented on hardware manner using Xilinx FPGA device. Obtained results in terms of hardware resources and security analysis demonstrate that the proposed hardware chaos‐based encryption approach is very useful for securing many embedded applications, namely, the Internet of Things (IoT).