Biometric Jammer: Preventing surreptitious fingerprint photography without inconveniencing users

As fingerprint authentication technology becomes more advanced, it is being used in a growing range of personal devices such as PCs and smartphones. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that digital cameras can be used to capture people's fingerprints remotely, leaving them at risk of illegal log-ins or identity theft. This article shows how photographs can be processed to facilitate illegal fingerprint authentication. To prevent this from happening, we also propose a method that defeats the use of surreptitious photography to replicate fingerprints from photographs while still allowing contact-based fingerprint sensors to respond normally. We have verified that an implementation of the proposed method called Biometric Jammer can be worn to effectively prevent the illegal acquisition of fingerprints by surreptitious photography without inconveniencing the user or preventing the use of legitimate fingerprint authentication devices.