Inference-Based Similarity Search in Randomized Montgomery Domains for Privacy-Preserving Biometric Identification

Biometric identification services have been applied to almost all aspects of life. However, how to securely and efficiently identify an individual in a huge biometric dataset is still very challenging. For one thing, biometric data is very sensitive and should be kept secure during the process of biometric identification. On the other hand, searching a biometric template in a large dataset can be very time-consuming, especially when some privacy-preserving measures are adopted. To address this problem, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving biometric identification scheme based on the FITing-tree, iDistance, and a symmetric homomorphic encryption (SHE) scheme with two cloud servers. With our proposed scheme, the privacy of the user’s identification request and service provider’s dataset is guaranteed, while the computational costs of the cloud servers in searching the biometric dataset can be kept at an acceptable level. Detailed security analysis shows that the privacy of both the biometric dataset and biometric identification request is well protected during the identification service. In addition, we implement our proposed scheme and compare it to a previously reported M-Tree based privacy-preserving identification scheme in terms of computational and communication costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is indeed efficient in terms of computational and communication costs while identifying a biometric template in a large dataset.

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Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Similarity Search

Journal of Database Management ◽

10.4018/jdm.2014070103 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 48-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stepan Kozak ◽

David Novak ◽

Pavel Zezula

Keyword(s):

Similarity Search ◽

Data Privacy ◽

System Analysis ◽

Keyword Search ◽

Evaluation Criteria ◽

Similarity Index ◽

Data Retrieval ◽

Privacy Preserving ◽

Scientific Data ◽

Sensitive Data

The general trend in data management is to outsource data to 3rd party systems that would provide data retrieval as a service. This approach naturally brings privacy concerns about the (potentially sensitive) data. Recently, quite extensive research has been done on privacy-preserving outsourcing of traditional exact-match and keyword search. However, not much attention has been paid to outsourcing of similarity search, which is essential in content-based retrieval in current multimedia, sensor or scientific data. In this paper, the authors propose a scheme of outsourcing similarity search. They define evaluation criteria for these systems with an emphasis on usability, privacy and efficiency in real applications. These criteria can be used as a general guideline for a practical system analysis and we use them to survey and mutually compare existing approaches. As the main result, the authors propose a novel dynamic similarity index EM-Index that works for an arbitrary metric space and ensures data privacy and thus is suitable for search systems outsourced for example in a cloud environment. In comparison with other approaches, the index is fully dynamic (update operations are efficient) and its aim is to transfer as much load from clients to the server as possible.

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