Fake fingertip generation from a minutiae template

This work reports a preliminary study on the vulnerability evaluation of fingerprint verification systems to direct attacks carried out with fake fingertips created from minutiae templates. The attack is performed by presenting to the acquisition sensor a fake fingertip generated from an image reconstructed from a compromised minutiae-based template. Experiments carried out against a state-of-the-art fingerprint recognition algorithm show that the proposed attack scheme is definitely feasible and highlight a potential security threat in the use of non-encrypted minutiae-based templates.