Fingerprint reproduced from photos of a Politician’s hands 1


Megan Geuss reports on the Arstechnica website that a hacker has been able to recreate a fingerprint of German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen just from photographs.

The technique was revealed at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Convention in Hamburg by German hacker Jan Krissler, who used commercially available software and high resolution photographs taken of her hands at a press conference, to produce the fingerprint.  The significance of the research is that objects carrying fingerprints will no longer need to be acquired to obtain a given person’s fingerprints, which could then be used to access devices which use fingerprint readers such as Apple’s iPhone 6.

Although fingerprints are a favoured biometric, because they can be reproduced some security experts have suggested that other biometric keys are used for identification such as vein patterns, which are not an outwardly identifiable physical trait.


One thought on “Fingerprint reproduced from photos of a Politician’s hands

  • cloudstarer

    So this biometric can be compromised from a photograph therefore we should immediately switch to a different biometric.

    The fingerprint is dead, long live the earprint, until that’s compromised ?

    So we need to purchase different biometric scanners to replace the fingerprint ones.

    Just think if we’d stuck with passwords/passphrases/passkeys we wouldn’t have all this expense.

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