With the widespread use of biometric recognition, several issues related to the privacy and security provided by this technology have been recently raised and analysed. As a result, the early common belief among the biometrics community of templates irreversibility has been proven wrong. It is now an accepted fact that it is possible to reconstruct from an unprotected template a synthetic sample that matches the bona fide one. This reverse engineering process, commonly referred to as \textit{inverse biometrics}, constitutes a severe threat for biometric systems from two different angles: on the one hand, sensitive personal data (i.e., biometric data) can be derived from compromised unprotected templates; on the other hand, other powerful attacks can be launched building upon these reconstructed samples. Given its important implications, biometric stakeholders have produced over the last fifteen years numerous works analysing the different aspects related to inverse biometrics: development of reconstruction algorithms for different characteristics; proposal of methodologies to assess the vulnerabilities of biometric systems to the aforementioned algorithms; development of countermeasures to reduce the possible effects of attacks. The present article is an effort to condense all this information in one comprehensive review of: the problem itself, the evaluation of the problem, and the mitigation of the problem. The present article is an effort to condense all this information in one comprehensive review of: the problem itself, the evaluation of the problem, and the mitigation of the problem.

翻译：随着生物特征识别的广泛应用，近期人们提出并分析了该技术在隐私与安全方面存在的若干问题。因此，生物特征识别领域早期普遍认为模板不可逆的信念已被证明是错误的。目前公认的事实是，从非保护模板中重建出与真实样本匹配的合成样本是可行的。这种逆向工程过程通常被称为“逆生物特征识别”，从两个不同角度对生物特征系统构成严重威胁：一方面，敏感的个人数据（即生物特征数据）可从受损的非保护模板中推导得出；另一方面，基于这些重建样本可发起其他强大的攻击。鉴于其重要影响，生物特征识别相关方在过去十五年间发表了大量研究，分析逆生物特征识别的各个方面：开发面向不同特征的各类重建算法；提出评估生物特征系统对上述算法脆弱性的方法论；制定减少攻击可能影响的对策。本文旨在将这些信息浓缩为一份全面综述，涵盖问题本身、问题评估以及问题缓解。本文旨在将这些信息浓缩为一份全面综述，涵盖问题本身、问题评估以及问题缓解。