Researchers create ‘master key’ fingerprints that can fool biometric databases

Researchers from New York University have created a set of master fingerprint keys that can be used to spoof biometric identification systems.

While the database of fingerprints used by the researchers had a chance of falsely matching with a random fingerprint one out of 1000 times, the master prints they generated had the power to falsely match one out of five times.

This is alarming because a growing number of devices, and large scale databases like India’s Aadhar, use digital fingerprinting to uniquely identify users – and could potentially be targeted with such ‘master key’ fingerprints by identity thieves.

Full article: Researchers create ‘master key’ fingerprints that can fool biometric databases