Hardware-software co-design of a fingerprint matcher on card

Nowadays, security is becoming a real need for society and a real challenge for those everyday activities such as access control, cash terminals, public transport, internet... where user authentication is required prior to giving access to confidential information, relevant places or restricted resources. The implementation of a reliable personal recognition system not based on vulnerable topics such as physical keys or passwords is required. Biometrics-based authentication techniques (e.g. face, iris, fingerprint recognition...) in conjunction with smart cards technologies bring a challenging solution to this need. This paper describes the hardware-software co-design of a fingerprint Match On Card system responsible for matching two fingerprint minutiae sets in a reliable and secure way. The proposed system architecture is composed by a general-purpose 8-bit microcontroller and a 40-kgates FPGA, all embedded in a system on chip device. A good solution is detailed from a performance versus cost point-of-view.