Are spoofs from latent fingerprints a real threat for the best state-of-art liveness detectors?

Abstract

We investigated the threat level of realistic attacks using latent fingerprints against sensors equipped with state-of-art liveness detectors and fingerprint verification systems which integrate such liveness algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, only a previous investigation was done with spoofs from latent prints. In this paper, we focus on using snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. These pictures provide molds, that allows, after some digital processing, to fabricate high-quality spoofs. Taking a snapshot picture is much simpler than developing fingerprints left on a surface by magnetic powders and lifting the trace by a tape. What we are interested here is to evaluate preliminary at which extent attacks of the kind can be considered a real threat for state-of-art fingerprint liveness detectors and verification systems. To this aim, we collected a novel data set of live and spoof images fabricated with snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. This data set provide a set of attacks at the most favourable conditions. We refer to this method and the related data set as "ScreenSpoof". Then, we tested with it the performances of the best liveness detection algorithms, namely, the three winners of the LivDet competition. Reported results point out that the ScreenSpoof method is a threat of the same level, in terms of detection and verification errors, than that of attacks using spoofs fabricated with the full consensus of the victim. We think that this is a notable result, never reported in previous work.

LivDet 2021 Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition - Into the unknown

“…One of the novelties of this edition concerns the spoof fabrication method. In addition to the classic consensual method, in which the mold is created through user collaboration, we have also employed the semi-consensual ScreenSpoof technique [3]. This method consists of taking a snapshot of the latent fingerprints left on a smartphone screen, imprinted during its regular use.…”

“…The test set was made up of images from different people and materials, as usual, always consensually fabricated. However, we adopted an additional test set made up of semi-consensual replicas, acquired through the ScreenSpoof technique recently proposed in [3]. This fake fabrication method turned out to be highly dangerous, as it does not require the full cooperation of the user.…”