Evaluating Minutiae Template Vulnerability to Masquerade Attack

Recent studies have questioned the widespread belief of non-reversibility of fingerprint templates and suggested the possibility of a masquerade attack, that is, attempting to spoof a recognition system through a fingerprint image reconstructed from a template. In this work, a feasible approach to generate fingerprint images from minutiae-based templates is introduced and systematic experiments to evaluate the success chances of such a masquerade attack against eight state-of-the-art fingerprint matching algorithms are reported. The experimental results prove the efficacy of the proposed approach and suggest the importance of seriously taking into account this kind of attack and implementing specific countermeasures. Index Terms – Biometric systems, masquerade attack, security, minutiae template, fingerprint reconstruction.