The tape that beat Japan’s fingerprint scanning machines
February 20th, 2009 by James
TBS News gives us a look at the tape that several South Koreans supposedly used to fool the fingerprint scanning machines at Japanese immigration checkpoints:
Brokers sold them for high prices, but it only cost about 68 yen and a day of work to create the silicon fingerprint tape. South Korean police are in the process of investigating the scheme and finding out who was behind it.
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Didn’t Mythbusters do something similar to this?
I remember reading something about fingerprint scanners being fooled by photocopies and by a jellybaby technique.
As soon as someone relies on technology, people immediately start to find ways around it. Hmm.
Thats crazy. And ya Mythbusters did something similar to this. They took a fingerprint, enlarged a scan of it on a computer, printed the scan, then red-defined the edges using a sharpie, then shrunk it back down and created a gelatin-ish mold from that. It worked well.
The system is unrealiable.
But the worst part is that the persons who are being scanned by this system have absolutely no way of protecting their biometric data. There are no restrictions by the law as to how long those fingerprints can be stored. To imagine what bad things could happen with high-quality scans of my fingerprints makes me sick.