Crypto-biometrics

The marriage of biometrics and cryptography has taken a new step with the publication of the paper Fuzzy Vault for Fingerprints by U. Uludag, S. Pankanti and A. Jain of the Michigan State University Biometrics Research Group.

Essentially, the algorithm hides a 128-bit key in a new structure, the fuzzy vault, a virtual vault that doesn’t contain the key itself but the coefficients of a polynomial, which can only be reconstructed by acquiring the fingerprint minutiae.

Here is a diagram of the algorithm (click on it to see it in detail):

I wrote a description in English, which you can read at darksideprogramming.