Symmetric key generation with multimodal biometrics: A survey

Biometrics of each human being is unique and distinct. There can never be an exact match to anyone of them. Because of its universality and uniqueness biometric has been used for key applications which require secrecy or irrevocability. Hence came the term Crypto-biometric where in biometric is ingeniously integrated with cryptography to generate private keys which can be then used for encryption and decrypting message. So why the need of generating private key. Private key usually used for AES are 128 bit key which is long and cumbersome for users to by heart. So with this method the same private key is generated from fingerprint and can be further used for cryptography. This paper deals with survey of the existing methodologies to generate keys from biometrics features such as using fingerprint alone or only with iris or fusing fingerprints and iris or fusing two fingerprints of same person. A fusion process is also taken into consideration through which fusion of two biometric features are done and combined to get the keys. This fusion process is usually done at feature level. This fusion process adds an additional layer of security by having two biometric feature instead of depending only on one biometric feature.