  The paper studies the problem of securely storing biometric passwords, such
as fingerprints and irises. With the help of coding theory Juels and Wattenberg
derived in 1999 a scheme where similar input strings will be accepted as the
same biometric. In the same time nothing could be learned from the stored data.
They called their scheme a "fuzzy commitment scheme". In this paper we will
revisit the solution of Juels and Wattenberg and we will provide answers to two
important questions: What type of error-correcting codes should be used and
what happens if biometric templates are not uniformly distributed, i.e. the
biometric data come with redundancy. Answering the first question will lead us
to the search for low-rate large-minimum distance error-correcting codes which
come with efficient decoding algorithms up to the designed distance. In order
to answer the second question we relate the rate required with a quantity
connected to the "entropy" of the string, trying to estimate a sort of
"capacity", if we want to see a flavor of the converse of Shannon's noisy
coding theorem. Finally we deal with side-problems arising in a practical
implementation and we propose a possible solution to the main one that seems to
have so far prevented real life applications of the fuzzy scheme, as far as we
know.
