Rapid explosion of the biometric authentication systems into new domains each day has created security concerns all across the digital world. Among many known vulnerabilities and adversary attacks on biometric systems, tampering the template database is the critical one. Several biometric template protection techniques are in place exploiting the security features of cryptosystems, watermarking, steganography and biometric transformation at various levels and magnitude. This paper conducts an extensive survey on the significant biometric template security techniques, suggested and applied on different types of biometric systems. Also we discuss the security issues and measures for the cloud storage of biometric data which provides the greatest advantage of scalability. © Research India Publications.