 This is Russell Brand with The Verge and today we're going to break into some phones. President of VeecanSee, a biometrics company, is coming by. His name is Jason Chakin. And he's gotten pretty good at cloning fingerprints. I have abnormally smooth fingerprints. As it turns out, one of our video guys, Phil, has volunteered. We logged in his fingerprint, so he's now recognized as a user of my phone. And we're going to clone his fingerprint and then use it to break into my phone. So today we did this with dental molding and Play-Doh, but there are a lot of other ways to do it. Especially if you already have an image of someone's fingerprint, but you don't have the actual finger. You can 3D print the mold instead of using dental mold and then put Play-Doh in that and break into a phone. In this case, you've got my finger. I'm consensually giving you my fingerprints and I'm participating in the process. But in theory, you could do this to someone without their knowing. Well, more than in theory, in 2014, I think, the Chaos Computer Club of Germany issued a challenge. And it was a guy named Starbuck who was the first to be able to lift a fingerprint off of a bottle of beer, create a mold, and then successfully open up an iPhone. And then later on, he did something even more dramatic, which was take some latent photographs of Germany's Minister of Defense, so as able to get the print off of her fingerprints and then create an image, transfer that to a material, and then make a print. And in a public forum, he sort of challenged that I can enter your phone. She accepted the challenge and proved that it was true. There are a lot of really big fingerprint databases, a lot of which are controlled by the government. If you got a visa to enter the United States, they took your fingerprint. The Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense all have enormous biometric databases that are collecting fingerprints at a huge scale, even local police departments. And sometimes those databases leak. We saw this with the OPM hack that leaked a huge number of federal workers' fingerprints onto the open web. If you want to use those fingerprints to break into someone's phone, you can do it. That should make us a little bit nervous about using fingerprints as the main way to log into our phone. If you're really interested in being the only person who can access your phone, you probably want to stick to the passcode at this point. There are ways around that. VKanSee wants to make it higher res imagery that can't be taken from latent prints, can't be taken from a lot of these databases, and maybe, but for the time being, if you've got an image of someone's fingerprint, you can get into their phone.
 This is Russell Brand with The Verge and today we're going to break into some phones.
 President of VeecanSee, a biometrics company, is coming by. His name is Jason Chakin.
 And he's gotten pretty good at cloning fingerprints. I have abnormally smooth fingerprints.
 As it turns out, one of our video guys, Phil, has volunteered. We logged in his fingerprint,
 so he's now recognized as a user of my phone. And we're going to clone his fingerprint and then use
 it to break into my phone. So today we did this with dental molding and Play-Doh, but there are
 a lot of other ways to do it. Especially if you already have an image of someone's fingerprint,
 but you don't have the actual finger. You can 3D print the mold instead of using dental mold and
 then put Play-Doh in that and break into a phone. In this case, you've got my finger. I'm consensually
 giving you my fingerprints and I'm participating in the process. But in theory, you could do this
 to someone without their knowing. Well, more than in theory, in 2014, I think, the Chaos Computer Club
 of Germany issued a challenge. And it was a guy named Starbuck who was the first to be able to
 lift a fingerprint off of a bottle of beer, create a mold, and then successfully open up an iPhone.
 And then later on, he did something even more dramatic, which was take some latent photographs
 of Germany's Minister of Defense, so as able to get the print off of her fingerprints and then
 create an image, transfer that to a material, and then make a print. And in a public forum,
 he sort of challenged that I can enter your phone. She accepted the challenge and proved that it was
 true. There are a lot of really big fingerprint databases, a lot of which are controlled by the
 government. If you got a visa to enter the United States, they took your fingerprint. The Department
 of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense all have enormous
 biometric databases that are collecting fingerprints at a huge scale, even local
 police departments. And sometimes those databases leak. We saw this with the OPM hack that leaked
 a huge number of federal workers' fingerprints onto the open web. If you want to use those
 fingerprints to break into someone's phone, you can do it. That should make us a little bit nervous
 about using fingerprints as the main way to log into our phone. If you're really interested in
 being the only person who can access your phone, you probably want to stick to the passcode at this
 point. There are ways around that. VKanSee wants to make it higher res imagery that can't be taken
 from latent prints, can't be taken from a lot of these databases, and maybe, but for the time being,
 if you've got an image of someone's fingerprint, you can get into their phone.