Abstract

Biometric authentication has become a crucial element of digital identity systems, leading to a rise in significant challenges for information governance, privacy, and organizational trust. Current approaches address either biometric template protection or liveness verification in isolation, significantly overlooking their interdependence in privacy-preserving system design. In practice biometric privacy depends jointly on template protection, liveness verification, and compliance with biometric standards such as ISO/IEC 24745, which define irreversibility, unlinkability, and renewability requirements. Without integrating all three, biometric systems remain vulnerable. A cryptographically protected template may still be exploited if liveness checks fail, whereas standalone liveness mechanisms risk exposing sensitive biometric features. This research-in-progress paper presents ZKBioVault, a conceptual framework that integrates cancellable biometrics, fuzzy vault cryptosystems, and zero-knowledge proofs to support privacy-preserving authentication. Combining principles from the biometric template protection literature and ISO/IEC 24745 standards, the framework introduces a two-phase architecture that is designed for responsible digital infrastructure. A scenario-driven application example demonstrates how ZKBioVault can reduce organizational risk and strengthen the trust placed in biometric information management. This is extremely useful in environments which are increasingly affected by synthetic and AI-generated biometric artifacts.

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