The use of biometrics (e.g., fingerprints, irises,
faces) for recognizing individuals is becoming increasingly
popular and many applications are already available.
Biometrics are intrinsically associated with individuals and
cannot be forgotten or shared with others. However, one of the
most relevant vulnerabilities of biometrics is that once a
biometric template is compromised, it cannot be reissued,
updated or destroyed. An attacker could then gain access to all
the accounts/services/applications using that same biometric
trait. This paper proposes a biometric verification system using
distributed source coding principles, with enhanced security
with respect to traditional biometric verification systems. The
generation of different templates from the same biometric data
is supported, as well as cancelable templates. Furthermore, it
will not be possible to recover the original biometric data from
the stored data, thus guaranteeing its privacy.