  The \textit{fuzzy vault} approach is one of the best studied and well
accepted ideas for binding cryptographic security into biometric
authentication. The vault has been implemented in connection with fingerprint
data by Uludag and Jain. We show that this instance of the vault is vulnerable
to brute force attack. An interceptor of the vault data can recover both secret
and template data using only generally affordable computational resources. Some
possible alternatives are then discussed and it is suggested that cryptographic
security may be preferable to the one - way function approach to biometric
security.
