A Japanese researcher presented a study on Tuesday at the International Telecommunications Union"s Workshop on Security in Seoul, Korea, showing that fingerprint readers can be fooled 80 percent of the time by a fake finger created with gelatin sporting prints lifted from a glass, for example.
The results should be enough to send fingerprint sensor makers back to the drawing board, said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer with Counterpane Internet Security.
"He didn"t use expensive equipment or a specialized laboratory," he wrote in his monthly newsletter Cryptogram, which first reported the study. "He used US$10 of ingredients you could buy and whipped up his gummy fingers in the equivalent of a home kitchen."
Despite its rudimentary nature, the technique defeated 11 different commercial fingerprint readers. Biometric security makers, though, are not quite ready to eat their technology.