A Novel Biometric Identification Scheme Based on Zero-Knowledge Succinct Noninteractive Argument of Knowledge

Abstract

Biometric identification is a convenient and reliable method in identity authentication. The widespread adoption of biometric identification requires strong privacy protection against possible theft or loss of biometric data. Existing techniques for privacy-preserving biometric identification mainly rely on traditional cryptographic technology such as oblivious transfer and homomorphic encryption, which will incur huge expenses to the system and cannot be applied to large-scale practical applications. For these issues, we propose a biometric identification scheme by constructing zero-knowledge succinct noninteractive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK). Our scheme not only reduces the communication overhead, which only needs to send 8 constants to the verifier but also can protect the fingerprint template from disclosure. The time complexity of proof generation and proof verification are about O(C) and <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <a:mi>O</a:mi> <a:mfenced open="(" close=")" separators="|"> <a:mrow> <a:mi>x</a:mi> </a:mrow> </a:mfenced> <a:mo>+</a:mo> <a:mi mathvariant="normal">log</a:mi> <a:mtext> </a:mtext> <a:mtext> </a:mtext> <a:mi>C</a:mi> </a:math> , respectively, and the size of the proof is only 8 constants, where C and x represent the size of the circuit and the public input, respectively. We have implemented the proposed authentication solution on a public data set of fingerprint images and evaluated the performance and security.