On the Feasibility of Fully Homomorphic Encryption of Minutiae-Based Fingerprint Representations

Abstract

Protecting minutiae-based fingerprint templates with fully homomorphic encryption has recently been recognised as a hard problem. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art fingerprint recognition based on minutiae templates using post-quantum secure fully homomorphic encryption that operates directly on floating point numbers, such that no simplification or quantisation of the comparison algorithm is necessary. In a practical evaluation on a publicly available dataset, we run a benchmark and provide directions for future work.