Kim Cameron has an excellent post on his Identity Weblog – Fingerprint charade – where he points attention to the inherent lack of security of those computers that uses the user’s fingerprint for access.

As can be seen on the photo above it is pretty easy to reproduce the exact fingerprint of the user just from photographing the mousepad in high resolution from a particular angle in a light.

I understand that this option indeed makes it possible for a clever hacker to copy the exact feutures of your fingerprint and somehow use this to get access to the computer through its fingerprint recognition facilities. But this option is not realistically available to the unsophisticated computer user such as me.

But I acknowledge Kim Cameron’s conclusion

The net of all of this was to drive home, yet again, just how silly it is to use a “public” secret to identify someone. What kind of a lock was this? It was a lock which conveniently offered any thief the key.

It hit me that in the age of digital photography, a properly motivated photographer could probably find fingerprints on all kinds of surfaces, and capture them as expertly as Dale did. I realized it was no longer necessary to use special powder or inks or tape or whatever. Fingerprints have become a thing of “sousveillance”.

Technorati Tags:
kimcameron, identityweblog, fingerprints