Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How to fake a fingerprint and break into a phone”.
This is Russell Brandon with the verge, and today we’re going to break into some phones. President of e can see a biometrics company is coming by his name’s Jason shaken and he’s gotten pretty good at cloning fingerprints. I have abnormally smooth fingerprints as it turns out. One of our video guys Phil has volunteered. We logged in his fingerprint, so he’s now recognized as a user of my phone and we’re gon na clone his fingerprint and then use it to break into my phone.
So today we did this with dental molding and play-doh, but there are a lot of other ways to do it, especially if you already have an image of someone’s fingerprint, but you don’t have the actual finger. You can 3d print the mold instead of using dental mold and then put play-doh in that and breaking it on. In this case, you got my finger, I’m consensually, giving you my fingerprint and I’m participating in the process, but in theory you could do this to someone without their knowing well more than in theory in 2014. I think the Chaos Computer Club of Germany any challenge – and it was a guy named Starbuck, who was the first to be with a lift of fingerprint off of a bottle of beer, create a mold and then successfully open up an iPhone and then later on.
He did something even more dramatic, which was take some latent photographs of Germany’s Ministry of Defense, so I was able to get the print off of her fingerprints and then create an image transfer that to a material and then make a print and in a public forum He easy sort of challenged that I can enter your phone. She accepted the challenge and proved that it was true. There are a lot of readings, big fingerprint databases, a lot of which are controlled by the government. If you got a visa to enter the United States, they took your fingerprint the Department of Justice Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense all have enormous biometric databases that are collecting fingerprints at a huge scale, even local police departments, and sometimes those databases leak.
We saw this with the OPM hack that leaked a huge number of federal workers, fingerprints onto the open web. If you want to use those fingerprints to break into someone’s phone, you can do it. That should make us a little bit nervous about using fingerprints as the main way to log into our phone.
If your interested in being the only person who can access your phone, you probably want to stick to the passcode at this point. There are ways around that. We can see wants to make it higher res imagery that can’t be taken from latent prints, can’t be taken from a lot of these databases and maybe, but for the time being, if you’ve got an image of someone’s fingerprint, you can get into their phone.
It’S like you as a favor, Shiki yeah, good uh. I can solicit talk. Yeah .