Author: Fawaz Alsaadi

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13:

Throughout human history, the achievement of security through authentication has been filled with challenges. Technological evolution has created an unprecedented conjunction of scale and artifice that have turned our attention to authenticating individuals in the oldest of ways, their physical characteristics, which we now know as biometric authentication. Our trust in biometric authentication is founded upon our belief that certain physical characteristics are sufficiently invariant and proof from counterfeit. However, anytime value is entrusted to a belief, there are those who seek to test that belief, which has resulted in current attempts of implementing biometric authentication facing many limitations, bringing into question the extent to which they can be effective. This dissertation is concerned not with a physical characteristic, but the remnant of a physical characteristic. Fingerprints are impressions left by friction ridges. They are singular in that each finger produces a single, irreplaceable fingerprint. The locations and directions of certain aspects of friction ridges are the biometrics of fingerprints. Friction ridges are pliable, rendering fingerprints that vary, while combinations of aspects of these ridges may be common among many fingers. Recent events have brought into question the actual availability of fingerprints. Approaches to representing fingerprints as information must consistently capture the complexity of fingerprints despite variations while approaches to discriminating these representations must distinguish differences from the same finger from differences from different fingers despite variations and commonalities. Additionally, durable approaches to authentication must produce secure credentials unique to individual authentication applications that are readily replaceable when compromise occurs. This dissertation analyzes these challenges of utilizing fingerprints in authentication applications, discusses how they affect existing approaches, proposes novel approaches to address them, and evaluates these approaches.