2011
AUTHENTICATION OF FINGERPRINT SCANNERS
V. Ivanov ans J. S. Baras
Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2011), pp. 1912-1915, Prague, Czech Republic, May 22-27, 2011.
Abstract
Fingerprint scanners have unique patterns that can be used to
distinguish one scanner from another one. The pattern, which
we call scanner pattern, stems from the variability of device
characteristics at silicon level and is caused by imperfections
of the conversion from the input to the scanner (i.e., the object
applied to it) to its output (i.e., the digital image). The scanner
pattern is a sufficiently unique and persistent intrinsic characteristic
of the fingerprint scanners even to those of the same
technology, manufacturer, and model. We propose a simple
and extremely accurate algorithm that is able to distinguish
the pattern of one scanner from the pattern of another scanner
of exactly the same model by extracting the pattern from
a single image, acquired with each scanner. In this way, the
scanner pattern can be used to enhance the security of a biometric
system by authenticating the scanner, used to acquire
a particular fingerprint image, and thus detect attacks on the
scanner. Combining the biometric authentication with a scanner
authentication leads to a two-part authentication, which
we call bipartite authentication, that verifies both the identity
of the user and the “identity” of the fingerprint scanner.
Index Terms— Authentication, biometric authentication, fingerprint scanner, pattern noise, scanner pattern.