Secure Fingerprint Alignment and Matching Protocols

We present three secure privacy-preserving protocols for fingerprint alignment and matching, based on what are considered to be the most precise and efficient fingerprint recognition algorithms-those based on the geometric matching of "landmarks" known as minutia points. Our protocols allow two or more honest-but-curious parties to compare their respective privately-held fingerprints in a secure way such that they each learn nothing more than a highly-accurate score of how well the fingerprints match. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time fingerprint alignment based on minutiae is considered in a secure computation framework. We present secure fingerprint alignment and matching protocols in both the two-party setting using garbled circuit evaluation and in the multi-party setting using secret sharing techniques. In addition to providing precise and efficient protocols for secure fingerprint alignment and matching, our protocols involve the design of a number of secure sub-protocols for complex operations, including sine, cosine, arctangent, square root, and selection, which are likely to be of independent interest.