Digital Smarts - Fooling Your Phone’s Fingerprint Scanner

Fingerprinting has become a standard method of authenticating your identity, being that no two fingerprints are exactly alike. As it turns out, researchers at New York University and Michigan State University have recently found they are hardly foolproof. The team has developed a set of fake fingerprints that are digital composites of common features found in many people’s fingerprints. Through computer simulations, they were able to achieve matches 65 percent of the time, though they imagine the scheme might not be as successful in real life. Still, it is another link in the reasoning behind more two- step authentication methods for accessing information that many companies are promoting.