Preventing that translation back from the database to the fingerprint is the topic I wanted to do for my PhD. We have strong cryptographic hashes used for things like passwords that must match exactly: it's possible to make the computer check whether the password is right without giving it enough information to actually reconstruct the password short of testing them all until one matches. There's very little known about how to do something similar with something like a fingerprint where a fuzzy match is needed - a secure robust hash, where "robust" means it can still match under small changes. At the moment, about the best we can do is store a reconstructible copy of the fingerprint to compare against.
The topic I've ended up actually doing, though, is quite a lot different from that.
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Date: Saturday, 24 November 2007 02:23 pm (UTC)The topic I've ended up actually doing, though, is quite a lot different from that.