An Embedded Biometric Sensor for Ubiquitous Authentication

Communication networks and distributed technologiesmove people towards the era of ubiquitous computing. Anubiquitous environment needs many authentication sensors forusers recognition, in order to provide a secure infrastructure forboth user access to resources and services and informationmanagement. Today the security requirements must ensuresecure and trusted user information to protect sensitive dataresource access and they could be used for user traceability insidethe platform. Conventional authentication systems, based onusername and password, are in crisis since they are not able toguarantee a suitable security level for several applications.Biometric authentication systems represent a valid alternative tothe conventional authentication systems providing a flexible einfrastructuretowards an integrated solution supporting therequirement for improved inter-organizational functionality. Inthis work the study and the implementation of a fingerprintsbasedembedded biometric system is proposed. Typical strategiesimplemented in Identity Management Systems could be useful toprotect biometric information. The proposed sensor can be seenas a self-contained sensor: it performs the all elaboration steps onboard, a necessary requisite to strengthen security, so thatsensible data are securely managed and stored inside the sensor,without any data leaking out. The sensor has been prototyped viaan FPGA-based platform achieving fast execution time and agood final throughput. Resources used, elaboration times of thesensor are reported. Finally, recognition rates of the proposedembedded biometric sensor have been evaluated consideringthree different databases: the FVC2002 reference database, theCSAI/Biometrika proprietary database, and the CSAI/Secugenproprietary database. The best achieved FAR and FRR indexesare respectively 1.07% and 8.33%, with an elaboration time of183.32 ms and a working frequency of 22.5 MHz.