A keyless multimodal-based user authentication scheme using generative adversarial networks

Biometrics are increasingly used for access control, fraud detection, and authentication systems. Nevertheless, attackers can deceive such systems using forged biometrics. This research proposes a novel method that makes biometric security systems more resilient to such attacks. The proposed method transforms the user’s biometric data into an irreversible code to protect the original data. This code combines data from multiple biometric modalities, making fabricating a false biometric harder. Additionally, the proposed method does not depend on any secret keys, which helps avoid cases of stolen tokens. The proposed method utilizes the generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate synthetic biometric templates from multiple modalities, which is considered a transformation function for biometric data. Three fusion levels are presented; features from multiple biometric modalities are extracted first in each fusion level. Subsequently, the features train a generative adversarial network to produce synthesized biometric templates. These synthesized templates serve as secure substitutes for the original biometrics during authentication, preventing direct exposure of raw biometric data. We evaluated our methods on the CASIA-V3-Internal and MMU1 iris datasets and the AT&T (ORL) and FERET face datasets. The results showed that our proposed methods can achieve higher accuracy, usability, and improved security compared to a single biometric modality. The proposed feature-level, GAN-based, and decision-level fusion schemes achieved 2.03%, 0.82%, and 0.0297% error rates, respectively, for CASIA and ORL datasets and 1.53%, 0.80%, and 0.0313% error rates, respectively, for MMU1 and FERET datasets. Moreover, we have demonstrated that our method resists pre-image and correlation attacks.