The disruptive technology of blockchain can deliver secure solutions without the need for a central authority. In blockchain, assets that belong to a participant are controlled through the private key of an asymmetric key pair that is owned by the participant. Although, this lets blockchain network participants to have sovereignty on their assets, it comes with the responsibility of managing their own keys. Currently, there exists two major bottlenecks in managing keys; @math users don't have an efficient and secure way to store their keys, @math no efficient recovery mechanism exists in case the keys are lost. In this study, we propose secure methods to efficiently store and recover keys. For the first, we introduce an efficient encryption mechanism to securely encrypt and decrypt the private key using the owner's biometric signature. For the later, we introduce an efficient recovery mechanism using biometrics and secret sharing scheme. By applying the proposed key encryption and recovery mechanism, asset owners are able to securely store their keys on their devices and recover the keys in case they are lost.
Selecting appropriate biometric data to create key pairs in decentralized digital blockchain identity is another issue that must be considered. Researchers have investigated several biometric features in biometric based cryptographic key generations @cite_22 .
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Human users have a tough time remembering long cryptographic keys. Hence, researchers, for so long, have been examining ways to utilize biometric features of the user instead of a memorable password or passphrase, in an effort to generate strong and repeatable cryptographic keys. Our objective is to incorporate the volatility of the user's biometric features into the generated key, so as to make the key unguessable to an attacker lacking significant knowledge of the user's biometrics. We go one step further trying to incorporate multiple biometric modalities into cryptographic key generation so as to provide better security. In this article, we propose an efficient approach based on multimodal biometrics (Iris and fingerprint) for generation of secure cryptographic key. The proposed approach is composed of three modules namely, 1) Feature extraction, 2) Multimodal biometric template generation and 3) Cryptographic key generation. Initially, the features, minutiae points and texture properties are extracted from the fingerprint and iris images respectively. Subsequently, the extracted features are fused together at the feature level to construct the multi-biometric template. Finally, a 256-bit secure cryptographic key is generated from the multi-biometric template. For experimentation, we have employed the fingerprint images obtained from publicly available sources and the iris images from CASIA Iris Database. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Existing asymmetric encryption algorithms require the storage of the secret private key. Stored keys are often protected by poorly selected user passwords that can either be guessed or obtained through brute force attacks. This is a weak link in the overall encryption system and can potentially compromise the integrity of sensitive data. Combining biometrics with cryptography is seen as a possible solution but any biometric cryptosystem must be able to overcome small variations present between different acquisitions of the same biometric in order to produce consistent keys. This paper discusses a new method which uses an entropy based feature extraction process coupled with Reed-Solomon error correcting codes that can generate deterministic bit-sequences from the output of an iterative one-way transform. The technique is evaluated using 3D face data and is shown to reliably produce keys of suitable length for 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). In this paper, we propose a ranking based locality sensitive hashing inspired two-factor cancelable biometrics, dubbed “Index-of-Max” (IoM) hashing for biometric template protection. With externally generated random parameters, IoM hashing transforms a real-valued biometric feature vector into discrete index (max ranked) hashed code. We demonstrate two realizations from IoM hashing notion, namely Gaussian Random Projection based and Uniformly Random Permutation based hashing schemes. The discrete indices representation nature of IoM hashed codes enjoy several merits. Firstly, IoM hashing empowers strong concealment to the biometric information. This contributes to the solid ground of non-invertibility guarantee. Secondly, IoM hashing is insensitive to the features magnitude, hence is more robust against biometric features variation. Thirdly, the magnitude-independence trait of IoM hashing makes the hash codes being scale-invariant, which is critical for matching and feature alignment. The experimental results demonstrate favorable accuracy performance on benchmark FVC2002 and FVC2004 fingerprint databases. The analyses justify its resilience to the existing and newly introduced security and privacy attacks as well as satisfy the revocability and unlinkability criteria of cancelable biometrics. In this study, a generic treatment of how to generate biometric keys from binary biometric templates is presented. A context-based analysis of iris biometric feature vectors based on which stable biometric keys are extracted is proposed. Most reliable bits in binary iris codes are detected and utilised to construct keys from fuzzy biometric data. The proposed key-generation scheme is adapted to diverse iris biometric feature extraction algorithms, evaluated on a comprehensive database and compared against existing iris biometric cryptosystems. In addition, the scheme is extended to provide fully revocable biometric keys, long enough to be applied in generic cryptosystems. Experimental results confirm the soundness of the approach.