In plain words: A system learns to draw realistic fingerprints, then an evolutionary search hunts for fake prints that fool a matcher into accepting many different people's fingers. These full fake images tricked far more users than earlier fakes built from simple ridge features.
Abstract · DeepMasterPrints: Generating MasterPrints for Dictionary Attacks via Latent Variable Evolution
Recent research has demonstrated the vulnerability of fingerprint recognition systems to dictionary attacks based on MasterPrints. MasterPrints are real or synthetic fingerprints that can fortuitously match with a large number of fingerprints thereby undermining the security afforded by fingerprint systems. Previous work by Roy et al. generated synthetic MasterPrints at the feature-level. In this work we generate complete image-level MasterPrints known as DeepMasterPrints, whose attack accuracy is found to be much superior than that of previous methods. The proposed method, referred to as Latent Variable Evolution, is based on training a Generative Adversarial Network on a set of real fingerprint images. Stochastic search in the form of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy is then used to search for latent input variables to the generator network that can maximize the number of impostor matches as assessed by a fingerprint recognizer. Experiments convey the efficacy of the proposed method in generating DeepMasterPrints. The underlying method is likely to have broad applications in fingerprint security as well as fingerprint synthesis.
Philip Bontrager, Aditi Roy, Julian Togelius, Nasir Memon, Arun Ross
arXiv:1705.07386 · cs.CV, cs.CR, cs.LG · submitted May 21, 2017 · updated Oct 18, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 8 pages; added new verification systems and diagrams. Accepted to conference Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems 2018