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

So...

[DougOtto]

The scientists are giving them the finger?

Re:So...

[Wycliffe]

It's a cool use of 3D Printing; but couldn't just putting the victim's finger on the phone work?

If you would have read the article, it states that the body was too decayed. Another possibly scenario would be where the body hasn't been found yet and they find the phone in the victim's apartment, along side the road, etc... There are plenty of situations where you might have a prerecorded fingerprint but not a body.

Oh, and call me cynical but my guess is that one of the reasons it's being tried in this case is to set a precedence in a "safe" case so they can later use it against living people with a search warrant.

So much for biometrics being more "Secure"

[PinkyGigglebrain]

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.

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.

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.

Way to shoot yourself in the foot, LEOs

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

So even without the conductive layer . . .

[mmell]

the police can put my fingerprint anywhere they want? Conceivably to be "found" later on and used as evidence against me?

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."