Error Tolerance Techniques for Binding Cryptographic Key with Biometrics

Modern cryptography has one issue to be solved: key management. One proposed solution to the issue is to binding biometrics with cryptographic key. However, the nonreproducible measurements of biometrics make it difficult to bind a key with biometrics due to the exactitude requirement of cryptographic key. To bind a cryptographic key with a biometric, error tolerance technique has to be applied to process the biometric information. In this paper, we briefly survey the error tolerance techniques that have been proposed to minimize the fuzziness of biometric measurements. Since it is typical that different biometrics have to be measured with different instruments, different methods may have to be chosen for best measurement results. Advances in the topic are reported with a few representative biometrics, including keystroke, voice, signature, face, iris, and fingerprint. Since for all biometric applications the central issue to be solved is the fuzzy matching problem. We reported our preliminary testing results in this aspect.