Patent attributes
A device, method, and computer readable storage medium generate a biometric public key for an individual based on both the individual's biometric data and a secret, in a manner that verifiably characterizes both while tending to prevent recovery of either by anyone other than the individual. The biometric public key may be later used to authenticate a subject purporting to be the individual, using a computing facility that need not rely on a hardware root of trust. Such biometric public keys may be distributed without compromising the individual's biometric data. In operation, a confident subset of a set of biometric values of the subject is extracted, including by performing a transform of the set of biometric values. The transform may variously be a Gabor transform, a wavelet transform, processing by a machine learning system, etc.