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.

Comments

Here's the interesting part...

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:So much for biometrics being more "Secure"

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The only biometric signature hardware that I've seen that I would consider seriously difficult to spoof would be the deep-vein reader:

http://www.fujitsu.com/us/solu...
http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...

They use "Palm Vein Authentication" and this seems like it would be really, really tough to trick. I think it would be very hard to recreate the sensor signature, probably harder than a retinal scan.