Efficient multimodal cancelable biometric system based on steganography and cryptography

Due to the development of hacking programs, it has become easy to penetrate systems. Hence, there is a need for strong security mechanisms. The use of traditional passwords has become insufficient to secure systems. Biometric authentication is now widely used for security applications, and it has proven to be superior compared to traditional authentication methods. However, two issues need to be considered in biometric systems. The first is not to keep biometric data in its original form in the database. If biometric traits are hacked, they will no longer be of use. Biometric data should be kept in cancelable forms for reuse. The second issue is the reliance on a single biometric, which limits the verification accuracy. This can be solved by using a multimodal biometric system. Using steganography and cryptography, this paper introduces a cancelable multimodal biometric system. As voiceprints, facial images, and fingerprint images are used. In this paper, the verification is performed through the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) of the voiceprints. Steganography is used as a tool to secure features extracted from voiceprints by embedding them into the facial image using block-based singular value decomposition (BSVD). Double random phase encoding (DRPE) is utilized as an encryption algorithm to generate the final cancelable templates. To increase the level of system security, fingerprint images are used as random phase masks (RPMs). Verification is performed by estimating the correlation between registered and test MFCCs. The correlation value is then compared with a threshold value, which is calculated using the distribution curves for the genuine and imposter correlations. Equal error rate (EER) values close to zero and an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AROC) that is close to one are obtained from the simulation results, demonstrating the outstanding performance of the suggested system. The proposed system achieves good performance in different domains.