Over the last couple of years, there has been a significant surge in the use of biometrics for user au thentication applications. Biometricsbased authentication offers several useful advantages over knowledge and possessionbased methods such as password/PINbased systems. When employed in securitycritical applications, and more so in unattended remote applications, the biometricsbased authentication systems should be designed to resist different sources of security attacks on the system. In this paper, we present the inherent strengths of a fingerprintbased authentication scheme and also describe the security holes in such systems. A new solution is presented to alleviate one of the weak links in the system.