The authentication of a person is a common task in many day-to-day situations. Withdrawing money or shopping on the internet are only two scenarios where a person has to identify himself or herself- and therefore has to be authenticated - in order gain access to some resource. In most cases the authentication process is based on passwords which a person has to input. However, passwords suffer from the problem that they can be forgotten, since sometimes tens of password have to be remembered. The aim of this project is to provide a solution for this problem by using something that every person has and cannot forget - fingerprints. Since the fingerprints of each person in the world are unique, the identification of a person by his or her fingerprint is a much more secure way than using passwords. However, one of the problems concerning the collection of fingerprints in databases is the possibility of the misuse and privacy concerns in general. For that reason one of the objectives this project is aiming at is a secure way of storing the fingerprints such that the only way of using such databases is for authentication purposes, i.e., no reconstruction of fingerprints should be possible.
The joint project BioKeyS is conducted in collaboration with the “Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik” (BSI), Fraunhofer Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung Darmstadt (IGD), Hochschule Darmstadt (h_da) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU).