So exactly how hard would it be to fool a capacitive fingerprint sensor with a lifted fingerprint? My iPod Touch can detect my fingers still even when wearing nitrile exam type gloves so the idea that a finger has to be living to be used to pass a sensor test doesn't impress me. It seems like I could easily lift a print with a similar conductive material and place it over my thumb with the conductive material in-between and the sensor would detect my biometrics but read the overlaid thumb print belonging to someone else (movies often show just how easy it is to lift prints, particularly in social situations).
Now maybe I'm missing something here in this technology that somehow magically bypasses any and every possible way of fooling it (somehow I doubt it) so without more information/proof, I wouldn't trust it as far as I could spit. In other words, this sensor is supposed to replace passwords??? REALLY? Thanks, but no thanks.
Frankly, I think the iWatch idea of setting a password on the watch ONCE and then wearing it all day and having it reset automatically when it's taken off your wrist to be a more intriguing idea, but then if it's transmitting the password over the air, even encrypted, it could be recorded and duplicated to play back to the device. It might need a rotating code scheme like garage door openers now use or something to that effect.
One way or another, as these devices increasingly are used like credit cards or are storing potentially sensitive ID or other important information, the question of just how good the security really is becomes more and more important. Frankly, even a 4-digit code has to have a limit on entry tries before the device hard locks and/or erases itself since there's only 10k possibilities there to begin with. I'd like to see some stats on just how effective this fingerprint reader really is in real world situations in combating attempts to fool it as I'm considering above.
could implement a finger print reader without destroying the basic design ideas of iDevices.
