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Police 3D-Printed A Murder Victim's Finger To Unlock His Phone (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Police in Michigan have a new tool for unlocking phones: 3D printing. According to a new report from Flash Forward creator Rose Eveleth, law enforcement officers approached professors at the University of Michigan earlier this year to reproduce a murder victim's fingerprint from a prerecorded scan. Once created, the 3D model would be used to create a false fingerprint, which could be used to unlock the phone. Because the investigation is ongoing, details are limited, and it's unclear whether the technique will be successful. Still, it's similar to techniques researchers have used in the past to re-create working fingerprint molds from scanned images, often in coordination with law enforcement. This may be the first confirmed case of police using the technique to unlock a phone in an active investigation. Apple has recently changed the way iOS manages fingerprint logins. You are now required to input an additional passcode if your phone hasn't been touched for eight hours and the passcode hasn't been entered in the past six days.
The scientists are giving them the finger?
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
...please don't try to unlock my phone. To me, having my privacy interfered with is a greater fear than being murdered.
iPhones give you only 48 hours to use a fingerprint before reverting to passphrase (and less than eight hours if you haven't unlocked by passcode within the last six days)
How long till they use 3D printing or such to replicate someones face or retina scan?
One more reason for me to never use or trust bio-metric authentication.
And now I have something I can point to and say "See?" when someone tries to convince me how great Bio-metrics are.
I mean if the guy is dead, why not just go down to the morgue and swipe his finger across the phone?
Here's the interesting part...
A 3D printed finger alone often canâ(TM)t unlock a phone these days. Most fingerprint readers used on phones are capacitive, which means they rely on the closing of tiny electrical circuits to work. The ridges of your fingers cause some of these circuits to come in contact with each other, generating an image of the fingerprint. Skin is conductive enough to close these circuits, but the normal 3D printing plastic isnâ(TM)t, so Arora coated the 3D printed fingers in a thin layer of metallic particles so that the fingerprint scanner can read them.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is a logical enough move, though I'm pretty sure you can do it without an actual 3d printer. We already know that fingerprints can be duplicated with very little effort indeed. But the problem for our esteemed LEO bunch here is that LEOs are now admitting this reality. And that brings up important sticky sticking points.
For, if they start to routinely duplicate fingerprints, what value do fingerprints found on the scene retain?
Also, now it turns out they're sitting on gigantic databases of other people's access keys, in the form of earlier taken fingerprints. You can trust them with that, can't you? They're totally trustable, right?
well, for 5 seconds it was
Apple is releasing the cock phone 9. To unlock you can either oral or anal it.
They say it will cost taxpayers less money because the cops know intuitively how to open it.
I'm ok if the deceased's family gave permission to do this. I'm totally NOT ok if they did this to unlock a suspects phone before he was proven guilty.
No it is Not something that only 3D printing made possible.
Prosecutor: "Can you explain how your fingerprints came to be on the murder weapon?"
Defendant: "I don't know. I never touched it. Never seen it before. Maybe the police put it there? Since we know they can, experience has shown that they will."
it's unclear whether the technique will be successful
The headline is misleading. They haven't actually unlocked the phone, they just think they might have a way. If not they'll need to call the FBI.
Live people have far more privacy protections than dead people do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Fingerprint authentication has never been, and will never be, adequately secure.
"But Arora said that in a few weeks, once he’s tested the fingers enough in the lab, he’ll hand them over."
In a few weeks? WTF! That's why anything for gov't costs an arm and a leg !
Wouldn't 'testing' take like 5 minutes?
You don't need to 3D print a finger to fabricate a fingerprint, a simple laser printer is enough:
http://www.instructables.com/i...
And in the process they've proven that because a finger print is found at a crime scene doesn't mean that their suspect was there. If I were a defense attorney I'd keep a copy of this case in my briefcase and whenever a prosecutor used finger prints as evidence I'd pull it out and say "I have a case right here where POLICE faked a finger print so if the prosecutor could please prove that these fingerprints were used actually came from my client"
Why not just use the victim's actual finger. Presumably, he's not using it anymore.
This seems like just a dumb reason to buy a 3D printer at a police station.
but is it??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The worlds First unlocked iPhone 5s with The penis
My phone dies with me. I'm sure many of my accounts die with me. I spend enough of my time keeping anyone, cops, bad guys, whoever, anyone, from reading my stuff. If they're going to /copy biometrics/ just to get access to some moron who kills me? No. I'm dead, doesn't matter anymore. Just leave me alone in death in the way you wouldn't in life.
I guess I'm glad everything's password and I have a really, really good memory and very fast fingers.
I like music
They can't use the actual finger? Or was the finger deformed?
Why didn't they ask the murder victim to swipe ... :-)
Never mind.
There is no way to spoof a fingerprint sensor with a 3D printer. It would take extremely precise printing, far better than any 3D printer the local cops are like to have and a very precise fingerprint. And a sensor that has no ability to note discrepancy with living tissue. So I am claiming complete bullshit pretense of far more powers than cops have.
Heck, I have to recalibrate my iThing fingerprint patterns every month or so to get it to recognize the real thing.
The original presentation on beating fingerprint sensors with ordinary laser printer printed copies of fingerprinters, laid on gelatin, published in 2002, is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/6.857/OldSt...
It's quite a good presentation, and was verified by MythBusters in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mythbusters even demonstrated that simply printing a fingerprint on paper, and _licking the paper_, created a fake fingerprint good enough to defeat most sensors. There's little reason to think that the commercial fingerprint sensors have gotten any better, though I'd welcome a modern retest with modern cell phone and computer keyboard based sensors.
Basically, the "fuzziness" of fingerprint sensors which allows to identify real fingers with real sensors is enough "fuziiness" to allow them to be beaten with even casually made fake fingerprints. I've seen no good evidence that the necessarysensor and computational "fuzziness" has ever been worked around with even the most expensive modern sensors: I'd welcome any evidence with honestly done tests showing otherwise.
Your fingerprint is not protected by the Constitution, whether you are dead or alive, while password is protected.
I'm sure this has been said already... but as a small reminder, if you want to protect your data, don't use your fingerprint.
For non-phone devices, you could probably at least come up with something that requires a finger-shaped input (e.g. requires finger inserted, pushes a button at the end to toggle the snapshot) and maybe a heat-sensor.
That might not exclude warm gelatin, but at least it'll beat a laser-printed print affixed to the end of a pencil etc.
The DNC should be able to just reach in the federal NSA database and tell the IRS who they should start punishing.
It's time for the government to modernize and silence all of this counter-revolutionary free market, open democracy, free speech stuff.