A hacker in Germany has demonstrated how to obtain a fingerprint from a photograph to overcome biometric security.

In a presentation made at the Chaos Computer Club, biometrics specialist Jan Krisller explained how he’d taken a variety of photographs of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen at a press briefing in October, then used commercial fingerprint software from Verifinger to map out the contours of the Minister’s thumbprint.

From this, Krisller was then able to recreate the thumbprint to a point where it could be used to fool biometric scanners.

Krissler said that the point of the exercise was intended to show how systems which use these prints can be outsmarted, even without the more traditional method of obtaining a fingerprint impression from a physical object.

Krissler isn’t resting at fingerprints however, and proclaimed that his next target is iris scanning, where he will attempt to print out an image of an iris to the extent that it too could fool biometric security.

The implications aren’t entirely groundbreaking, as fingerprint replication from physical surfaces has been done before, but it does highlight increasing security risks as biometric security extends into the everyday versus commercial usages, such as with the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 6. As more and more systems use biometric scanning, the likelihood of creative biometric data retrieval like the one demonstrated here will grow.

photo credit: Jca Servo via photopin cc