Biometric Identification Systems With Both Chosen and Generated Secret Keys by Allowing Correlation

Abstract: We propose a biometric identification system where the chosen- and generated-secret keys are used simultaneously, and investigate its fundamental limits from information-theoretic perspectives. The system consists of two phases: enrollment and identification phases. In the enrollment phase, for each user, the encoder uses a secret key, which is chosen independently, and the biometric identifier to generate another secret key and a helper {data}. In the identification phase, observing the biometric sequence of the identified user, the decoder estimates index, chosen- and generated-secret keys of the identified user based on the helper {data} stored in the system database. In this study, the capacity region of such a system is characterized. In the problem setting, we allow chosen- and generated-secret keys to be correlated. As a result, by permitting the correlation of the two secret keys, the sum rate of the identification, chosen- and {generated-secret key} rates can achieve a larger value compared to the case where the keys {do not correlate}. Moreover, the minimum amount of the storage rate changes in accordance with both the identification and chosen-secret key rates, but that of the privacy-leakage rate depends only on the identification rate.