On the Generation of X.509v3 Certificates with Biometric Information

We present the kernel implementation of a Mobile Certification Authority (MCA). Our MCA kernel is able to issue digital certificates fully-complying with the X.509v3 standard; it supports either RSA or ECDSA as a public key cryptosystem engine and; it can incorporate biometric-based user identification information (in the form of fingerprint recognition) to the digital certificate. The MCA application was entirely written in C++ and it was tested in an iPAQ Pocket PC h5550. Our experiments show that an ECDSA-based digital certificate using the NIST recommended 163K elliptic curve constitutes an ideal selection for wireless environments. Such certificate can be generated with a size of 1635 bytes, and 592 bytes when including (or not) biometric information, respectively. keyword: X.509v3 digital certificates, mobile PKI, biometric authentication