Biometric identification has become increasingly popular in recent years. With the development of cloud computing, database owners are motivated to outsource the large size of biometric data and identification tasks to the cloud to get rid of the expensive storage and computation costs, which, however, brings potential threats to users’ privacy. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving biometric identification outsourcing scheme. Specifically, the biometric To execute a biometric identification, the database owner encrypts the query data and submits it to the cloud. The cloud performs identification operations over the encrypted database and returns the result to the database owner. A thorough security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is secure even if attackers can forge identification requests and collude with the cloud. Compared with previous protocols, experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves a better performance in both preparation and identification procedures.