Abstract: Recently, one of the significant methods of user identification is biometric identification. It has gained its popularity because of the non-repudiation of data, though it suffers problems such as biometric template storage, biometric spoof and the resulting security problems. To alleviate the problems, biometric encryption has become the focus of present studies. User's biometric data includes data such as face, fingerprint, iris, retinal scan, palmprint and hand vein etc. The traditional algorithms of encryption such as AES and DES are not suitable for biometric image encryption. The recent research on image encryption is in the chaos based encryption. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable algorithm for enhancing the security of biometric data using the chaotic map. A user intrinsic key from the biometric data is used to generate the chaotic sequence for encryption and for increasing the reliability.

Keywords: Biometric security; chaos; logistic map; diffusion.