Last year, German hacking collective, Chaos Computer club, announced that they can reproduce a real fingerprint based on a simple photograph of the person’s finger. Now, Jan Krissler who is popularly known as Starbug demonstrated in a conference how an image of the fingerprint can be converted into a real fingerprint.
He showed the images of Ursula von der Leyen’s (German Federal Minister) fingers he took in October 2014. Then he showed the image of the fingerprints he made out of the original image.
At that time he demonstrated that only those images with high-quality graphics could be cracked. But, this year he has demonstrated the same thing but on the images are taken from a distance with the help of laser printers.
This could really open a new way for the hackers to hack into people’s accounts that are protected by biometrics. For renowned personalities, this could be really dangerous as they rely heavily on biometrics to secure their accounts.
Starbug also disclosed the technology he has been using for making these fingerprint “TouchID” which is an iPhone feature used for securing the phone with a fingerprint. Starbugs cracked the way this feature was turning a finger snapshot image into a fingerprint.
Basically, the prime aim of Starbug behind demonstrating his findings is to show that every system has faults, nothing is perfect! Also, people should not rely 100 percent on a particular technology as everything can be exposed. Like people, these days rely heavily on biometrics but with these demonstrations, people might look for other options to secure their account but it doesn’t mean biometric technology is useless.
