Biometric Matching On Smartcard – BMOS

Biometric authentication systems are based on comparison of a biometric template, called a reference template, with a fresh one. To increase the security of the authentication phase and the protection of personal data, combining biometrics with a smartcard as another factor of authentication is widely used. A smartcard enables to store the reference template directly in its memory whereas a solution with a central database implies more important constraints on personal data protection. Following this privacy concern, the reference template should not be divulgated outside the smartcard. To this aim, the Match-On-Card (MOC) paradigm has been introduced; in particular for fingerprint recognition. This consists on executing the comparison (also called matching) of two fingerprints directly within the smartcard.

Existing MOC solutions have the following problem. Implementation either is software only or uses the arithmetic coprocessor, which is designed to accelerate cryptographic computations but not biometrics ones. In both cases, the trade-off between execution time and biometric error rates is thus not very good. Consequently, adding a security layer, as this is made for cryptographic operations, is hard. In our knowledge, no specific security protections against side channel attacks exist on MOC implementations today. In particular, there exist none security evaluations of the MOC part of a smartcard. Nevertheless, the security of the biometric matching is completely correlated to the privacy of the smartcard owner. In BMOS (Biometric Matching On Smartcard) project, we aim to improve the current situation by designing a hardware implementation enabling a fast and efficient matching, with good biometric performances, while offering the protection of personal biometric data thanks to a matching operation with integrated countermeasures against side channel attacks.

BMOS project can be overviewed through three big steps:
Analysing and designing a hardware architecture enabling the acceleration of a fingerprint matching with a low level of complexity and great biometric performances;
Securing the implementation to achieve a high level of protection of personal data;
Validating the effective security by internal evaluation.

With their respective expertise in, biometrics, smartcard software security, embedded software security, electronic circuits countermeasures, the partners will contribute to handle the following technical and scientific problems: vulnerabilities evaluation of MOC against side channel and fault injection attacks; scientific research of needed countermeasures ; design and implementation of an architecture with low complexity fitting to smartcard constraints while offering high biometric performances and low execution time.

Security of hardware implementations is today mainly focused on cryptographic operations and only a few on biometric ones. Therefore, beneficial effects of BMOS project will be important on a scientific side as on an economic side. BMOS project wants to create a technological breakthrough which could be exploited in a short term: a MOC technology, which would be efficient and ensuring protection of personal data, represents an important factor of growth of biometric authentication solutions, particularly for ID documents market.