Assessing the invertibility of deep biometric representations: Investigating CNN hyperparameters for enhanced security against adversarial attacks

Biometric recognition systems are pattern-recognition systems designed to identify users based on a vector of features, which may pertain to physiological or behavioral characteristics. These features are typically stored in databases. Despite the encryption algorithms employed to secure these databases, there is always a chance, however small, that an attacker could decrypt the data and gain access to the full set of features. Subsequently, the attacker could compare the acquired biometric information with templates corresponding to user identities, potentially leading to unauthorized identification. This study focuses on leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to compress images in a manner that increases the difficulty of restoring them, thereby reducing the effectiveness of such attacks. We employ CNNs to generate deep representations (features) and utilize deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs) to reconstruct the images from these features. Finally, the accuracy of the reconstructed images is analyzed using Bayesian beta regression and Random Forest to identify the CNN hyperparameters that have the greatest impact on reconstruction accuracy. Our findings indicate that for simpler datasets, such as black-and-white images of letters or digits (e.g., MNIST), the number of convolutional layers and the presence of pooling layers are the two most critical structural hyperparameters in securing image features. However, for more complex datasets, such as colored facial images (e.g., FaceScrub), activation functions and optimization algorithms become more significant in determining the security of biometric representations. • Investigating the security vulnerabilities of biometric recognition systems. • Exploring the use of CNNs to compress images, aiming to enhance security. • Utilizing DCGANs to reconstruct images and analyzing the accuracy. • Identifying which CNN parameters most affect the accuracy of reconstructed images. • Providing practical insights into optimizing biometric security measures.