Privacy and Security Matters in Biometric Technologies

This Open Access book explores the privacy and security challenges associated with biometric technologies from a multidisciplinary perspective. Biometrics remains a highly active field of research, encompassing developments in sensing technology, signal and image processing, information security, and machine learning, with strong links to areas such as forensic science, human-computer interaction, and systems engineering. As biometric technologies are increasingly applied across many areas of life, concerns about their privacy and security risks have become ever more important.

The book explores a range of issues in particular the analysis of risks, their mitigation and impact assessment as relating to the privacy and security of biometric technologies in a broad sense, including the extraction of demographic or identifiable information in human computer interaction. An introductory chapter summarizes the range of issues involved, providing relevant background and the contribution of the other chapters. The remaining chapters are grouped thematically, covering various technological, legal, and societal issues.

The book provides insight in the vulnerabilities related to user privacy and information security of biometric technologies in a wide sense, including mobile apps, user authentication, eHealth, privacy leakage of software, and virtual reality. Understanding the privacy and security risks of these technologies is of interest to researchers and developers as well as to data protection professionals and policy makers. It also provides state-of-the-art countermeasures to the vulnerabilities mentioned above. Part of a privacy-by-design-approach are cryptographic and information security solutions. The book present new and ground-breaking results in this domain, which is of interest to researcher and developers in this area. In order to address the societal consequences of the privacy and security risks addressed in this book and the proposed solutions, the book also studies their legal and ethical aspects as well as their user acceptance. This helps to inform developers about possible legal and ethical issues at an early stage and provides useful information to data-protection professionals.