CryptoFace: End-to-End Encrypted Face Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ao, Wei, Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ao, Wei
Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
author_facet Ao, Wei
Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
contents Face recognition is central to many authentication, security, and personalized applications. Yet, it suffers from significant privacy risks, particularly arising from unauthorized access to sensitive biometric data. This paper introduces CryptoFace, the first end-to-end encrypted face recognition system with fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). It enables secure processing of facial data across all stages of a face-recognition process--feature extraction, storage, and matching--without exposing raw images or features. We introduce a mixture of shallow patch convolutional networks to support higher-dimensional tensors via patch-based processing while reducing the multiplicative depth and, thus, inference latency. Parallel FHE evaluation of these networks ensures near-resolution-independent latency. On standard face recognition benchmarks, CryptoFace significantly accelerates inference and increases verification accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art FHE neural networks adapted for face recognition. CryptoFace will facilitate secure face recognition systems requiring robust and provable security. The code is available at https://github.com/human-analysis/CryptoFace.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00332
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CryptoFace: End-to-End Encrypted Face Recognition
Ao, Wei
Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Face recognition is central to many authentication, security, and personalized applications. Yet, it suffers from significant privacy risks, particularly arising from unauthorized access to sensitive biometric data. This paper introduces CryptoFace, the first end-to-end encrypted face recognition system with fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). It enables secure processing of facial data across all stages of a face-recognition process--feature extraction, storage, and matching--without exposing raw images or features. We introduce a mixture of shallow patch convolutional networks to support higher-dimensional tensors via patch-based processing while reducing the multiplicative depth and, thus, inference latency. Parallel FHE evaluation of these networks ensures near-resolution-independent latency. On standard face recognition benchmarks, CryptoFace significantly accelerates inference and increases verification accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art FHE neural networks adapted for face recognition. CryptoFace will facilitate secure face recognition systems requiring robust and provable security. The code is available at https://github.com/human-analysis/CryptoFace.
title CryptoFace: End-to-End Encrypted Face Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00332