preview

Essay On Fingerprint Finger

Good Essays

Creating Fake Fingers for Secure Biometric Fingerprint Authentication As the unrelenting demand for smartphones continues to increase, many technology companies are looking for ways of making such devices easier, faster, and more user friendly. Many smartphones are equipped with fingerprint readers, allowing the user to access their phones securely and quickly without having to type in their pin or passcode. This prevents users from having to remember dozens of random passphrases that, in theory, a hacker could potentially guess and be granted access into. However, this poses a serious question - How secure is fingerprint authentication and why should consumers trust that this technology will keep their information safe? Similarly, …show more content…

Capacitive readers work by measuring the differences in capacitance between the ridges and valleys to map out the fingerprint. Because of this, unlike the optical reader, there is no light component necessary in order to read the fingerprint. Thus, the capacitive sensors can be much smaller, and are commonly seen in smartphones, laptops, and tablets. In figure 1 below, the difference between the fingerprints captured by the optical (left) and capacitive (right) readers can be seen. Due to the smaller size of the capacitive reader, it captures a smaller area of the fingerprint. Anil Jain and Joshua Engelsma of Michigan State University are creating life like fake fingers, commonly referred to as “spoofs.” These pigmented, conductive silicon spoofs share properties similar to human skin; their mechanical, optical, and electrical properties allow it to act basically as a finger. With these spoofs, creators of fingerprint readers can use them for two purposes: 1. remove the discrepancy between optical and capacitive readers and 2. enable readers to detect for only real fingers to be granted access. The current problem with many of these readers is that if it was recorded on one type of reader, and the user tried to authenticate with a different type, it would fail. These spoofs will allow developers to test their systems, without having to use their own fingers over and over again, while also ensuring consistency. In

Get Access