A research team at Michigan State University led by biometrics expert Anil Jain has succeeded in spoofing a fingerprint to unlock a murder victim's phone.After being approached by police on the case, Jain, doctoral student Sunpreet Arora and postdoctoral student Kai Cao developed a 2D paper solution to unlock the Samsung Galaxy S6 of a the victim using his ink fingerprints from a previous arrest.”The fingerprints they provided us were just ink on paper, which doesn't have a conductive property,” Jain told NPR, in a July 27 report. “So the first thing we tried was to print the fingerprints on a special conductive paper, just like a photographic paper.”But initially this didn't work, so Jain's team then tried to use a 3D printed fingerprint, which despite its complexity also failed to unlock the device.Finally, the team returned to the 2-D printed fingerprints on conductive paper.They decided to try the right thumb, figuring that was the natural one based on how a person holds a phone. They applied it to the sensor. There was silence for a few minutes,” Jain said to the Detroit Free Press. “We were all wondering, 'Did it really work?' “Finally, this worked, the police quickly disabled the fingerprint lock and then assigned the phone a simple pass code.
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