Daily Archives: December 30, 2014


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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.

Fingerprint reproduced from photos of a Politician’s hands