Fingerprint-Based Authentication for USB Token Systems

Abstract

In the modern electronic world, the authentication of a person is an important task in many areas of day-to-day. Using biometrics to authenticate a person’s identity has several advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and passwords. To gain maximum security in the authentication system using biometrics, the computation of the authentication as well as the store of the biometric pattern has to take place in the security token(e.g., smart card, USB token). However, there is an open issue of integrating biometrics into the security token because of its limited resources(processing power and memory space). In this paper, we describe our implementation of the USB token system having 206MHz StrongARM CPU, 16MBytes Flash memory, and 1MBytes RAM. Then, we describe a fingerprint enrollment algorithm that can check false minutiae detected and true minutiae missed by using multiple impressions. Also, to meet the memory space specification and processing power of the security token in fingerprint verification algorithm, we describe a memory-efficient alignment algorithm. Based on experimental results, we confirmed that the RAM requirement of the proposed algorithm is about 16 KBytes, and the Equal Error Rate(EER) is 1.7%. Therefore, our fingerprint authentication algorithm can be executed in real-time on the developed USB token.