An overview of protection of privacy in multibiometrics

Biometric authentication systems (BASs) have various advantages over traditional authentication systems such as password based systems. In BASs, information related to individuals’ physical and psychological characteristics is employed for authentication. The leakage of such information will breach individuals’ privacy severely. To simultaneously protect privacy and achieve higher authentication accuracy, privacy preserving multibiometric authentication systems (PPMASs) have been developed. This paper provides a comprehensive review of PPMASs. Specifically, we outline the requirements of PPMASs and discuss the state-of-the-art PPMASs. We also discuss PPMASs in the context of mobile and cloud based applications. Furthermore, we show the drawbacks of the existing PPMASs and point out the future research directions of PPMASs.