Privacy-Preserving Biometric Authentication: Challenges and Directions

Box 1

The general setting for SMPC is the following. The system is made up of entities that jointly compute some public

function based on some individually secret data , without revealing their private inputs to one another. In other

words, SMPC allows the interactive computation among multiple parties in such a way that at the end of the process no

participant can learn more from and the result , than what could learn from her own secret data

. It is easy to see that SMPC can be very useful in privacy-preserving biometric authentication especially in

the distributed scenario, where multiple entities are involved in the authentication process [12] (e.g., a database ,

an authentication server and a matcher ). In this case, the function could be the distance between the fresh and the

stored biometric template and the goal would be to guarantee the secrecy of the biometric templates (fresh and stored).