How to protect biometric templates

In addition to the inherent qualities that biometrics posses, powerful signal processing tools enabled widespread deployment of the biometric-based identification/verification systems. However, due to the nature of biometric data, well-established cryptographic tools (such as hashing, encryption, etc.) are not sufficient for solving one of the most important problems related to biometric systems, namely, template security. In this paper, we examine and show how to apply a recently proposed secure sketch scheme in order to protect the biometric templates. We consider face biometrics and study how the performance of the authentication scheme would be affected after the application of the secure sketch. We further study the trade-off between the performance of the scheme and the bound of the entropy loss from the secure sketch.