On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:53 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:03 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >> I can beat that: I read, a month or so ago, how a bunch of elementary >> school kids discovered that wet Gummi Bears would hold a fingerprint, >> *and* (they didn't understand this) have more or less the same electrical >> conductivity.... > > Fortunately I don't go sticking my fingers in wet gummy bears, so that > risk is mitigated! > > While finger prints can be faked, it often requires access to the > finger to fake. I haven't heard of someone lifting a latent oil print > and creating a fake out of that. I'm sure with enough ingenuity it can > be done. Then again if someone is that intent on accessing your data, > well I'm sure they could figure another way as well... Nope. I found this link in a reference from 2002, and have seen nothing to indicate any significant improvement of fingerprint scanners to ignore gelatin based fake fingerprints, overlaid on a living person's finger to fool the electrostatic or thermal sensors of some sensors, and and with the fingeprints transferred from a Xerox of a police or other official fingerprint. http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0205.html This has me laughing my tail off at the insistence on including fingerprint authorization as a default in RHEL 6, and the difficulty of extracting the daemons and utilities from the base image. Too many scattered RPM dependencies for other utilities. It's actually now a default "enabled" feature in anaconda for kickstart installations.