Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here
The Register reports that German hackers have published a fingerprint from the country’s interior minister as a protest against the proposed inclusion of fingerprints in passports there. Dan Goodin writes:
A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.
In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers.
No-one from the Germany-based group has been able to test the foil to see if it can fool a computer into believing it came from Schauble. But the technique has been shown to work with a variety of other people’s prints on almost two-dozen readers, according to a colleague of the hacker who pulled off the demonstration.
“The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place,” said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. “It’s basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore.”
