Biometric sensors rapid prototyping on field-programmable gate arrays

Biometric user authentication in large-scale distributed systems involves passive scanners and networked workstations and databases for user data acquisition, processing, and encryption. Unfortunately, traditional biometric authentication systems are prone to several attacks, such as Replay Attacks, Communication Attacks, and Database Attacks. Embedded biometric sensors overcome security limits of conventional software recognition systems, hiding its common attack points. The availability of mature reconfigurable hardware technology, such as field-programmable gate arrays, allows the developers to design and prototype the whole embedded biometric sensors. In this work, two strong and invasive biometric traits, such as fingerprint and iris, have been considered, analyzed, and combined in unimodal and multimodal biometric sensors. Biometric sensor performance has been evaluated using the well-known FVC2002, CASIA, and BATH databases.