Biometric User Authentication for Heightened Information Security

Abstract

The need for heightened information security has expanded the research focus from securing the network to authenticating individual users. The aim of this paper is to present an infrastructure of trusted user authentication for heightened information security. Following techniques are developed to achieve the goal. Unlike the common post-boot authentication method, an approach of pre-boot biometric authentication is presented with different solutions to enhance network security. In real applications, privacy is a major concern in using biometric authentication systems. A two-way authentication method is therefore proposed, which will not only let the system authenticate the users, but also allow the users to verify the system before submitting their biometrics information. Based on these authentication strategies, a user authentication scheme for protecting high security resources is presented, which differentiates itself from most existing solutions by stressing security more than cost and ease-of-use.