A Collaborative Framework Design for Distributed Biometrics-based Authentication in the Cloud

Over the past several years, many companies have benefited from the implementation of cloud solutions within their own organisations. Due to advantages such as flexibility, mobility, and cost savings, we expect numbers of cloud users to grow rapidly. Consequently, organizations need a secure way to authenticate their users, in order to ensure the functionality and safety of their services. In this chapter, we design a collaborative framework to support biometrics-based authentication for cloud users under a distributed setting. In our design, we divide the biometric system into four distinct entities: the client, the service provider, the transformation agent, and the matching agent), so to prevent one party from controlling all the information and components during the authentication process. In particular, we want to prevent an adversary from bypassing the authentication system and from reconstructing the original biometric sample of the users during the verification process. We utilize a homomorphic cryptosystem in our biometric matching that allows operations in an encrypted form. We analyse security for our framework by considering attacks from each semi-honest entity and possible joint attacks from two or more semi-honest entities controlled by adversaries. Index Terms— Biometrics-based Authentication System, Collaborative Framework Design, Cloud Authentication, Privacy Protection.