Gadgetory

this is Russell Brandon with the verge and today we're going to break into some phones president of e can see a biometrics company is coming by his name's Jason shaken and he's gotten pretty good at cloning fingerprints I have abnormally smooth fingerprints as it turns out one of our video guys Phil has volunteered we logged in his fingerprint so he's now recognized as a user of my phone and we're gonna clone his fingerprint and then use it to break into my phone so today we did this with dental molding and play-doh but there are a lot of other ways to do it especially if you already have an image of someone's fingerprint but you don't have the actual finger you can 3d print the mold instead of using dental mold and then put play-doh in that and breaking it on in this case you got my finger I'm consensually giving you my fingerprint and I'm participating in the process but in theory you could do this to someone without their knowing well more than in theory in 2014 I think the Chaos Computer Club of Germany any challenge and it was a guy named Starbuck who was the first to be with a lift of fingerprint off of a bottle of beer create a mold and then successfully open up an iPhone and then later on he did something even more dramatic which was take some latent photographs of Germany's Ministry of Defense so I was able to get the print off of her fingerprints and then create an image transfer that to a material and then make a print and in a public forum he easy sort of challenged that I can enter your phone she accepted the challenge and proved that it was true there are a lot of readings big fingerprint databases a lot of which are controlled by the government if you got a visa to enter the United States they took your fingerprint the Department of Justice Department of Homeland Security the Department of Defense all have enormous biometric databases that are collecting fingerprints at a huge scale even local police departments and sometimes those databases leak we saw this with the OPM hack that leaked a huge number of federal workers fingerprints onto the open web if you want to use those fingerprints to break into someone's phone you can do it that should make us a little bit nervous about using fingerprints as the main way to log into our phone if your interested in being the only person who can access your phone you probably want to stick to the passcode at this point there are ways around that we can see wants to make it higher res imagery that can't be taken from latent prints can't be taken from a lot of these databases and maybe but for the time being if you've got an image of someone's fingerprint you can get into their phone it's like you as a favor Shiki yeah good uh I can solicit talk yeah