A presentation by Starbug at the 31st Chaos Communications Congress (previously) demonstrated a technique for deriving fingerprints from a couple of photographs of your hands. Starbug's proof of concept was a copy of the fingerprints of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen.
The problems with biometrics are the same as ever: your biometric markers are not a secret; they are not hard to reproduce without your permission; and you can't easily change them. This makes them nearly perfectly unsuited to use as authentication tokens.
Krissler said he used commercially available software called VeriFinger to pull off the feat. The main source was a close-up picture of von der Leyen's thumb, obtained during a news conference in October, along with photographs taken from different angles to get an image of the complete fingerprint.
Chaos Computer Club claims it can reproduce fingerprints from people's public photos [Emil Protalinski/Venturebeat]
(via /.)
(Image: Fingerprint Loop, public domain)
