Effective approach to establish a secure communication using fingerprint and secret data

Abstract

In recent times, establishing a secure communication and protecting information is a challenging task. Biometric trait can be used to protect information. Among the biometric traits, fingerprint is accepted universally due to its uniqueness. In this thesis, a method of establishing a secure communication using fingerprint and secret data is addressed. Steganography and Cryptography are two techniques useful to provide security to the information in a better way. Therefore, encryption of fingerprint is an important step to provide security to the information. Hence fingerprint is encrypted using encryption key and the secret data is embedded through the above techniques which improve the security to the next level. The complete process consists of two sides namely, sender and receiver. On the sender (client) side, fingerprint and secret data are accepted from the user. After that, Fingerprint is divided into four sub images. Subsequently, encryption key is also divided into four 32 bit keys. Hence, each image is shuffled and encrypted using encryption key. Thereafter, the identical values present in the LSB of an image are identified and removed. Consequently, free space is created. Subsequently, secret data is embedded through a unique spiral pattern and encrypted fingerprint image is superimposed on a cover image without disconcerting the secret data. newline