A hardware implementation of fingerprint verification for secure biometric authentication systems

Using biometrics to authenticate a person's identity has several advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers or passwords. To gain maximum security in the authentication system using biometrics, the computation of the authentication as well as the store of the biometric template has to take place in secure devices such as smart cards. However, it is challenging to integrate biometrics into secure devices because of limited rcsources(processing power and memory space). In this paper, we propose an area-time-accuracy efficient hardware design for a fingerprint matching system, which can be integrated into typical smart card chips. Experimental results show that the match operation can be completed in real time(190ms) on the proposed hardware, and the Equal Error Rate(EER) of 3.8% can be obtained. The hardware uses only 36K gates(2.4mm2 silicon area by using 0.25 um CMOS technology) and can be easily integrated into smart cards. In this scheme, all the critical information including the biometric template can be encapsulated within smart cards removing the risk of any data leaking out.