A speaker at a yearly hacking conference in Germany has claimed the ability to recreate someone’s fingerprints using just photographs of their fingers, as reported by the BBC.

This capability would highlight the compromised nature of replacing passwords with fingerprints, which is already seen by experts as far from fully secure.

In his talk at the Chaos Computer Club – Europe’s largest hacker organization – Jan Krissler said he used a high-profile target for his attempt: German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen.

Krissler, also known by the pseudonym “Starbug,” used several close-range photos from a “standard photo camera” of von der Leyen’s hand from a few angles before creating an image of her thumbprint via VeriFinger, a software program used to read fingerprints. (more…)