Get ready to emulate Mission Impossible style adventures because vein authentication, a biometric security method that scans the veins in your hand has been cracked!
Using a fake hand made out of wax, two researchers demonstrated how they were able to bypass scanners made by both Hitachi and Fujitsu, which they claim covers around 95% of the vein authentication market.
While imprints of fingerprints can often be left behind on surfaces just by touching them, vein patterns cannot, and are considered to be much more secure as a result.
However, this wasn’t a problem for the researchers, who were able to copy their target’s vein layout from a photograph taken with an SLR camera modified to remove its infrared filter.
Although constructing the wax hand eventually only required a single photograph and a construction time of 15 minutes, getting to that point took 30 days and over 2,500 test photos so budding Tom Cruise’s will have their work cut out for them!
