Planting attack on latent fingerprints

The fingerprint is arguably the most successfully deployed biometric data in a broad spectrum of applications for identification and verification purposes. While fingerprint matching algorithms are fairly matured, most studies have so far focused on improving the matching precision, and some effort has been channelled to combat spoofing attacks on biometric readers through liveness detection. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the feasibility of planting attacks of latent fingerprints has not been reported in the literature. In this study, the authors present a low-cost latent fingerprint planting attack involving steps that can be performed by an untrained person who has no prior knowledge in forensics. Experiment results based on a publicly available database suggest that this approach feasibly leads to planted latent fingerprints being indistinguishable from real ones. It is also verified that the planted latent fingerprints could be utilised to identify their corresponding rolled fingerprints, suggesting the viability of the proposed latent fingerprint planting attack.