Lightweight Bio-Chaos Crypt to Enhance the Security of Biometric Images in Internet of Things Applications

In recent times, numerous Internet of Things (IoT) applications have begun to use biometric identity for authentication purposes. The integrity and confidentiality of biometric templates during storage and transmission is crucial as it contains key information on the physical identity of the users. Encryption is an effective template protection technique. However, most of the edge side gadgets in the IoT environment require lightweight encryption schemes due to constraints in available power and memory space. Conventional cryptosystems are expensive because of their complexity and multiple rounds for encryption. In the present work, a lightweight bio-cryptosystem is developed to ensure security while storing and transmitting biometric templates. The proposed bio-crypto architecture has three stages—key generation, confusion and diffusion. A two-dimensional logistic sine map is used for key generation. A novel method of diffusion using DNA encoding and ciphering is proposed to decrease the complexity of the encryption process considerably and achieve desirable integrity. Simulations and security analysis indicate that the proposed cryptosystem has sufficient level of security and robustness, involves lesser computational complexity and has the potential of satisfying the requirements of IoT applications.