AES based symmetric-biometric crypto system using user password

Digital Security has become an area of concern with the increasing use of Internet for communication of sensitive data on both economic and personal fronts. To secure data from unauthorized access, encryption has become a necessity. Strength of the security relies on the key used for encryption. Now-a-days biometric keys are preferred because they are more reliable. The key used can be of two types-Symmetric and Asymmetric. In symmetric key the same key is used for encryption and decryption whereas for asymmetric key different keys are used for encryption and decryption. Majority of the systems use a single layer of security that is either user-password or biometric feature i.e., fingerprint, iris or palm etc. In our proposed work we have combined both fingerprint and user-password using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to generate a symmetric key thereby providing double layer of security. The fingerprint is used to extract the minutiae to generate a preliminary key using Euclidean distance method. The advantage of this system is that even if the attacker is able to lift either the fingerprint or the user-password then also he needs to get hold of the other feature which is the user password of varying length ranging from 6 to 8 characters, to get the secret key used for encryption/decryption.