I’m super excited to put out my first paper written solely with UConn students.  James and Sailesh have put a ton of work into this.  We build a full key derivation system from the human iris by integrating image processing and the crypto described in our previous paper.  I’m particularly excited because I started working on this problem in graduate school and it felt like we’d never get to an actual implementation.

Abstract: Mobile platforms use biometrics for authentication. Unfortunately, biometrics exhibit noise between repeated readings. Due to the noise, biometrics are stored in plaintext, so device compromise completely reveals the user’s biometric value.

To limit privacy violations, one can use fuzzy extractors to derive a stable cryptographic key from biometrics (Dodis et al., Eurocrypt 2004). Unfortunately, fuzzy extractors have not seen wide deployment due to insufficient security guarantees. Current fuzzy extractors provide no security for real biometric sources and no security if a user enrolls the same biometric with multiple devices or providers.

Previous work claims key derivation systems from the iris but only under weak adversary models. In particular, no known construction securely handles the case of multiple enrollments. Canetti et al. (Eurocrypt 2016) proposed a new fuzzy extractor called sample-then-lock.

We construct biometric key derivation for the iris starting from sample-then-lock. Achieving satisfactory parameters requires modifying and coupling of the image processing and the cryptography. Our construction is implemented in Python and being open-sourced. Our system has the following novel features:

— 45 bits of security. This bound is pessimistic, assuming the adversary can sample strings distributed according to the iris in constant time. Such an algorithm is not known.

— Secure enrollment with multiple services.

— Natural incorporation of a password, enabling multifactor authentication. The structure of the construction allows the overall security to be sum of the security of each factor (increasing security to 79 bits).