Image analysis – Applications – Personnel identification
Reexamination Certificate
2000-06-16
2004-12-28
Mehta, Bhavesh M. (Department: 2625)
Image analysis
Applications
Personnel identification
C382S115000, C340S005530, C340S005830, C902S003000, C902S004000, C902S025000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06836554
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to the field of image processing. More specifically, this invention relates to intentionally distorting the machine representation of biometrics and then using the distorted biometrics in secure and privacy-preserving transaction processing.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
A biometric is a physical or behavioral characteristics of a person that can be used to determine or authenticate a person's identity. Biometrics such as fingerprint impressions have been used in law enforcement agencies for decades to identify criminals. More recently other biometrics such as face, iris and signature are starting to be used to identify persons in many types of transactions, such as check cashing and ATM use. An automated biometrics identification system analyzes a biometrics signal using pattern recognition techniques and arrives at a decision whether the query biometrics signal is already present in the database. An authentication system tests whether the query biometrics is equal, or similar, to the stored biometrics associated with the claimed identity. A generic automated biometrics system has three stages: (i) signal acquisition; (ii) signal representation and (iii) pattern matching.
Authentication of a person is a fundamental task in many day to day activities. Several well established processes such as possession of driver's license, passwords, ATM cards, PINs and combinations thereof are used depending on the level of security needed by the application. Transaction oriented systems such as bank ATMs, point-of-sale terminals in retail stores require authentication tools for every transaction session. In a typical transaction, the client computer (ATM machine, cash register) transmits the account details of the customer as read from his card and the transaction details as entered by the clerk (or customer) to an authorization server. The authorization server checks the validity of the account, the account balance, and credit limit then approves or rejects the transaction. Approved credit card transactions result in payment from the credit card banking agencies to the store; approved ATM withdrawal transactions result in delivering cash. Except for the use of PINs (in ATMs and for debit cards) or a signature on the credit card authorization slip in a store, there is very little done to authenticate the user. Biometrics can play a significant role in such scenarios. For transactions such as the self-serve purchase of gasoline, simply the possession of a credit card is often enough. There is no attempt to determine that the card is used by the rightful owner.
PROBLEMS WITH THE PRIOR ART
One of the impediments in advancing the use of biometric authentication in commercial transaction systems is the public's perception of invasion of privacy. Beyond private information such as name, date of birth and other parametric data like that, the user is asked to give images of their body parts, such as fingers, faces and iris. These images, or other biometrics signals, will be stored in digital form in databases in many cases. With this digital technology, it may be very easy to copy biometrics signals and use the data for other purposes. For example, hackers could snoop on communication channels and intercept biometrics signals and reuse them without the knowledge of the proper owner of the biometrics. Another concern is the possible sharing of databases of biometrics signals with law enforcement agencies, or sharing of these databases among commercial organizations. The latter, of course, is a concern for any data gathered about customers. These privacy concerns can be summarized as follows:
1. Much data about customers and customer behavior is stored. The public is concerned about every bit of additional information that is known about them.
2. The public is, in general, suspicious of central storage of information that is associated with individuals. This type of data ranges from medical records to biometrics. These databases can be used and misused for all sorts of purposes, and the databases can be shared among organizations.
3. The public is, rightfully or wrongfully so, worried about giving out biometrics because these could be used for matching against databases used by law enforcement agencies. They could be, for example, be matched against the FBI or INS fingerprint databases to obtain criminal records. Hence, the transmission and storage of biometrics coupled with other personal parametric data is a concern. The potential use of these biometrics for searching other databases is a further concern.
Many of these concerns are aggravated by the fact that a biometrics cannot be changed. One of the properties that make biometrics so attractive for authentication purposes, their invariance over time, is also one of the liabilities of biometrics. When a credit card number is somehow compromised, the issuing bank can assign the customer a new credit card number. In general, when using artificial means, such an authentication problem can be easily fixed by canceling the compromised token and reissuing a new token to the user. When a biometrics is compromised, however, the user has very few options. In the case of fingerprints, the user has nine other options (his other fingers), but in the case of face or iris, the alternatives are quickly exhausted or nonexistent.
A further inconvenience of biometrics is that the same biometrics may be used for several, unrelated applications. That is, the user may enroll for several different services using the same biometrics: for building access, for computer login, for ATM use and so on. If the biometrics is compromised in one application, the biometrics is essentially compromised for all of them and somehow would need to be changed.
Several items of prior art propose methods for revoking keys and other authentication tokens. Because the keys and certificates are machine generated, they are easy to revoke conceptually.
A prior art image morphing technique that create intermediate images to be viewed serially to make an source object metamorphose into a different object is disclosed in.
Stanley E. Sclaroff and Alex Pentland,
“Finite-element method for image alignment and morphing”,
U.S. Pat. No. 5,590,261, December 1996.
This reference is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,590,261 to Sclaroff and Pentland describes a finite element-based method to determine the intermediate images based on motion modes of embedded nodal points in the source and the target image. Embedded nodal points that correspond to feature points in the images are represented by a generalized feature vector. Correspondence of feature points in the source and target image are determined by closeness of points in the feature vector space. This a technique is applied to the field of video production not biometrics, and focuses on a correspondence assignment technique that reduces the degree to which human intervention is required in morphing. Furthermore, for this technique to be applicable the source and the target images must be known.
The following references are incorporated by reference in their entirety:
Silvio Micali, “Certificate revocation system”, U.S. Pat. No. 5,793,868, August 1998.
Silvio Micali, “Certificate revocation system”, U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,416, September, 1997.
Silvio Micali, “Witness-based certificate revocation system”, U.S. Pat. No. 5,717,758, February 1998.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,793,868 to S. Micali discloses certificate management involving a certification authority (CA). Often when the key in a public key infrastructure has been compromised, or the user is no longer a client of a particular CA, the certificate has to be revoked. The CA periodically issues a certificate revocation list (CRL) which is very long and needs to be broadcast to all. The disclosure proposes to generate a hash of at least a part of the certificate. Minimal data identifying the certificate is added to the CRL if the data items are shared by two or more revoked certificates. The proposed method thus optimizes
Bolle Rudolf Maarten
Connell Jonathan H.
Ratha Nalini K.
Bayat Ali
International Business Machines - Corporation
Percello, Esq. Louis J.
LandOfFree
System and method for distorting a biometric for... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with System and method for distorting a biometric for..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and System and method for distorting a biometric for... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3312778