Distributed Biometric Authentication via Client-Side Encryption
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Solution Overview
Problem
Centralized biometric authentication systems face user adoption resistance due to privacy concerns and the risk of unauthorized access, as well as high storage and scalability issues, as large amounts of biometric data are stored in a single location, making them vulnerable to hacking and resulting in reputational and economic harm.
Innovation Solution
A distributed storage system where biometric data is encrypted and stored on client devices, with only a decryption key and hashing value stored on the biometric server, ensuring that biometric data is not stored on the server, thus reducing the risk of unauthorized access and minimizing storage requirements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If biometric data is stored centrally on a server, then authentication verification is simplified, but security risk and storage requirements increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides authentication data into two segments: encrypted biometric templates stored on the client device and decryption keys stored on the server. This segmentation ensures that even if the server is compromised, the actual biometric data remains secure on the client device, while still enabling centralized verification capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the most sensitive part of the biometric data (the actual template) from the server and places it on the client device in encrypted form. Only the decryption key remains on the server, which by itself is useless for reconstructing biometric data. This extraction resolves the contradiction by maintaining verification capability while removing the security risk of centralized storage.
2Ease of operation
If biometric data is stored centrally on a server, then authentication processing is simplified, but storage requirements and scalability issues increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates an encrypted copy of the biometric template that resides on the client device, while the server stores only the decryption key. This copying approach allows the authentication process to remain centralized (the server can still verify by decrypting and comparing) while dramatically reducing the storage burden on the server, as it only needs to store small key data rather than large biometric templates for all users.
Data Source
AI summary
A biometric server receives, a transmission of a biometric sample and an encrypted enrollment template of the user from a client device, wherein the encrypted enrollment template comprises an encrypted mathematical representation of historical biometric data of the user, and wherein the biometric sample comprises a current snapshot of the biometric data. The biometric server decrypts the encrypted enrollment template to an enrollment template using an enrollment template key. The biometric server converts the biometric sample to a biometric template. The biometric server, based on determining that the biometric template is similar to the enrollment template associated with the user, sends an access token to the client device.