Evolutionary methods for generating synthetic masterprint templates: Dictionary attack in fingerprint recognition

Recent research has demonstrated the possibility of generating 'Masterprints' that can be used by an adversary to launch a dictionary attack against a fingerprint recognition system. Masterprints are fingerprint images that fortuitously match with a large number of other fingerprints thereby compromising the security of a fingerprint-based biometric system, especially those equipped with small-sized fingerprint sensors. This work presents new methods for creating a synthetic MasterPrint dictionary that sequentially maximizes the probability of matching a large number of target fingerprints. Three techniques, namely Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), Differential Evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), are explored. Experiments carried out using a commercial fingerprint verification software, and public datasets, show that the proposed approaches performed quite well compared to the previously known MasterPrint generation methods.