The present paper provides a study of theoretical and practical security issues related to the deployment of generic reliable authentication mechanisms based on the use of biometrics and personal hardware tokens, like smart cards. The analysis covers various possible authentication infrastructures, but is mainly focused on the definition of basic requirements and constraints of a particular security scheme, namely client-side authentication. The deployment of such a scheme proves to be necessary when specific application deployment constraints are encountered, particularly when there is a conspicuous need to guarantee the privacy of the users. The paper suggests several solutions to this problem, and proposes a particular template protection technique based on a secure secret sharing scheme. The fundamental goal of this technique is to secure biometric systems sensitive to privacy issues and which rely, at some extent, on authentication performed at the client end of the application.
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