Proposal of a Transformation Method for Iris Codes in Iris Scanning Verification

In this paper, we propose a transformation function for a user’s raw iris data, an “iris code” in iris scanning verification on the server, since the iris code requires to be hidden from even a server administrator. We then show that the user can be properly authenticated on the server, even though the iris code is transformed by the proposed function. The reason is that the function has a characteristic, “The (normalized) Hamming distances between the enrolled iris codes and the verified iris codes are conserved before and after the computation of the function,” that is, the normalized Hamming distance in this scheme is equal to that in the existing scheme. We also show that the transformed iris code is sufficiently secure to hide the original iris code, even if a stronger attack model is supposed than the previously described model. That can be explained from the following two reasons. One reason is that nonlinear function, which consists of the three-dimensional rotation about the x-axis and the y-axis with the iris code lengthened bit by bit, and the cyclic shift, does not enable an attacker to conjecture the iris code. The other reason is that the success probabilities for the exhaustive search attack concerning the iris code in the supposed attack models are lower than those of the previously proposed methods and are negligible. key words: iris scanning verification, iris code, transformation function, hiding, exhaustive search attack