On the vulnerability of fingerprint verification systems to fake fingerprint attacks

A new method to generate gummy fingers is presented. A medium-size fake fingerprint database is described and two different fingerprint verification systems are evaluated on it. Three different scenarios are considered in the experiments, namely: enrollment and test with real fingerprints, enrollment and test with fake fingerprints, and enrollment with real fingerprints and test with fake fingerprints. Results for an optical and a thermal sweeping sensors are given. Both systems are shown to be vulnerable to direct attacks.