A Review of “Post-Quantum Biometric Authentication based on Homomorphic Encryption and Classic McEliece” [Póster]

Abstract

This work proposes a secure biometric authentication scheme that applies homomorphic encryption based on the Classic McEliece public-key encryption algorithm, which is a finalist at the round 4 of the NIST post-quantum standardization process. Its use is proposed in a non-device-centric biometric authentication architecture composed of client devices and external servers (database, computation and authentication servers). Privacy, irreversibility, revocability and unlinkability are satisfied and the scheme is robust to stolen-device, False Acceptance Rate, and similarity-based attacks as well as to honest-but-curious servers. Experimental results with public databases (FERET and LFW) and an Android App, Python code and MySQL show that the proposed scheme improves the accuracy of the unprotected scheme, allows real-time execution in the clients and servers for Classic McEliece security parameter sets of 128 and 256 bits, and offer reduced storage requirements and communication overheads.