Bio-cryptography using Zernike Moments and Key Generation by Cubic Splines

Abstract

Cryptography is the process of protecting sensitive information and making it unreadable to unwanted parties. Since all algorithms that perform this task depend on the process of finding a suitable key, the key generation is considered the soul of powerful encryption. The traditionally generated keys are long and random, hence are difficult to memorize, and we need a database to store the keys. To alleviate this limitation, we use bio-cryptography that is combined of biometrics and cryptography. Using Bio-Cryptography generated keys provides the necessary security through powerful encryption and decryption of data. This paper uses cubic spline to generate a cryptographic key through extracting the features from fingerprint. The approach is based on extracting the features generated by using Zernike Moment on a biometric, and then sending these features to a Cubic-Spline Interpolator to generate the keys. A key encryption will be generated for every person through extracting the features from his / her biometric (fingerprint) and then applying these features on the cubic spline interpolator to obtain some points. These interpolated points will be used as keys to encrypt the information by using a suitable encryption algorithm.  The benefit presented by this approach is to ensure a high level of security to protect the information through generating secure keys ready to be used for unsecured channel. In this paper, we used fingerprints from Biometric Recognition Group - ATVS to examine the performance of this approach.

Keywords: Biometrics, Key Generation, Zernike Moment, Cubic Spline, Cryptography, RSA, Fingerprint.