http://www.physorg.com/news11171.html

How secure are your fingerprints?Can they be copied on a copier and used to fake out a scanner?If someone wanted your prints bad enough, your finger could be amputated.
People have had hands amputated by thieves to steal a Rolex with a combination-locked band.
If you are talking about very high security situations,then whatever technology is used should verify that the print is indeed attached to a living, breathing human being before authentication.This means more sensors have to be incorporated into the fingerprint scanner, such as pulse, body temp, skin conductivity,coupled with facial recognition, retinal scan, etc.

yes.. Gel-finger.

I also remember a story (from March 2005) where .....

"CRIMINALS chopped off the tip of a man's finger in Malaysia to override a high-tech security feature that required his fingerprint to start his luxury car, a report said today ....

(Google it for the rest as it was a wire news story)

Interesting discussion on it all as well as the full original story here.

Me? I wouldn't touch it. (no pun intended)

Andrew Smith
Brisbane, Australia.

Even if the liveness issues can be truly solved, there is a portion of the population with poor quality fingerprints that can't be matched (bricklayers, paper-pushers, and the like). Although this probably wouldn't fly in the consumer market, multi-modal biometrics may be needed for more secure access.

Care must also be taken to ensure that spurious print images are not injected into the system AFTER the sensor capture process.