A few days ago I was cleaning the screen of my notebook, which’s a Lenovo X61 Tablet. I’m using it everyday and especially for my studies I’m working in tablet-mode, which means that I have to clean up the screen about every two weeks. During cleaning I recognized, that there are many fingerprints of mine on the touchscreen. Whoops… haven’t we seen more than enough how to fake fingerprints? I think we have and did you see that there is a built in fingerprint reader in the X61. Let’s think about this. We’ve got more and more devices which have a touchscreen and at the same time, more devices allow you to log in with your fingerprint. This means, that in the near future an attacker don’t need any password of you, he just steals a device and then build his key (the fingerprint) right from the touchscreen.
To make this more visible to you, I’ve made a photo of my screen:
As you can see, this is really a good enough fingerprint to copy it.
PS: I smudged three lines on the picture because it’s my own fingerprint 
That doesn’t even need to be a touchscreen. Aren’t you using your fingers on a laptop keyboard ? Aren’t you using your fingers to hold that same laptop ?
Hi glandium,
of course I do but from my point of view the quality of a fingerprint on a touchscreen is much better. People really press their fingers on this screens so you’ll get pretty good fingerprints but for example on a keyboard, people put their fingers on it in let’s say an angle of about 45 degree, which will make them more or less useless.
Anyway, I’m not an expert on this so if anyone has something more to say on this, please do so
Very interesting article. I am an engineer in the Biometrics industry. Our organization develops hardware based on a capacitive sensor. The sensor is constructed of Silicone. By the use of silicone, we are able to devise a threshold that reads beyond the top, or dead layer of skin, through to the live derma region where the print actually resides. Without this, or a touch of saliva, you can extract as many prints as you would like, they just would not authenticate. Even as good a quality image as you have shown. It will not authenticate to any silicone biometric sensor. That is fact. Just thought you would like an experts view. Again, great topic!