Not to mention what would happen if your finger was cut and covered with blood defenting your self untill you got the safe open? Would it open then?

Gun, 51, saves man, 83

Long-neglected revolver kills armed intruder in retiree's HuntersPoint home

A.D. Parker didn't pay much attention to the old revolver he kept stashed under his bed.

He bought the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 51 years ago and by his own reckoning fired it only seven or eight times - and not at all for about 30 years. He rarely oiled the weapon and, for decades, just left it beneath a rug under his bed.

But in the one brief moment in his life when the 83-year-old Parker really needed a gun, it worked.

[...]

I had some Explorers think this was a good idea a while ago. I explained to them all of the potential things that can happen to screw it up, and their mind changed to something to the effect of "that's a really stupid idea." From their perspective, some of the potential problems:
- You're bleeding and your finger is covered in blood.
- You have other materials on your hand such as dirt from a roll in the mud, oil from a car, or any of the numerous other crap that your hand comes into contact with during the day.
- You burned your hand and your prints are not readable
- You're wearing rubber gloves because you're treating a patient, or you're dealing with a person who does not appear clean.
- You're wearing cut gloves
- You're wearing winter gloves
- One of the bad guys bullets hit your finger
- You aren't able to develop a proper firing grip on the gun while you're struggling to keep it.
- You broke your fingers during the course of the fight
- You forgot to charge your battteries
- Your gun got soaked in water and shorted out

What else can go wrong? Nope, not for me.

How about the bad guy cut off the victums hand/finger so the bad guy had access to the victums gun/car/accounts. At cub you can pay for stuff with a thumb print, I am just waiting for some one to show up with a plastic bag full of thumbs to pay for stuff.

Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors

Sticky problem for biometrics firms
By John Leyden
Published Thursday 16th May 2002 12:35 GMT

A Japanese cryptographer has demonstrated how fingerprint recognition devices can be fooled using a combination of low cunning, cheap kitchen supplies and a digital camera.

First Tsutomu Matsumoto used gelatine (as found in Gummi Bears and other sweets) and a plastic mould to create a fake finger, which he found fooled fingerprint detectors four times out of five.

Flushed with his success, he took latent fingerprints from a glass, which he enhanced with a cyanoacrylate adhesive (super-glue fumes) and photographed with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improved the contrast of the image and printed the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet.

Here comes the clever bit.

Matsumoto took a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (which can be found in many electronic hobby shops) and used the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper.

From this he made a gelatine finger using the print on the PCB, using the same process as before. Again this fooled fingerprint detectors about 80 per cent of the time.

Fingerprint biometric devices, which attempt to identify people on the basis of their fingerprint, are touted as highly secure and almost impossible to fool but Matsumoto's work calls this comforting notion into question. The equipment he used is neither particularly hi-tech, nor expensive and if Matsumoto can pull off the trick what would corporate espionage boffins be capable of?

Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them.

Noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier, the founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, described Matsumoto's work as more than impressive.

"The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing," said Schneier in yesterday's edition of his Crypto-Gram newsletter, which first publicised the issue. ®