Matsumoto is not a professional fake-finger scientist he's a mathematician. There's both a specific and a general moral to take away from this result. The results are enough to scrap the systems completely, and to send the various fingerprint biometric companies packing. Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them. This lets you hide it as you press your own finger onto the sensor. Simply form the clear gelatin finger over your own. Gummy fingers can even fool sensors being watched by guards. This also fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time. (You can find photo-sensitive PCBs, along with instructions for use, in most electronics hobby shops.) Finally, he makes a gelatin finger using the print on the PCB. Then, he takes a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (PCB) and uses the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper, making it three-dimensional. Using PhotoShop, he improves the contrast and prints the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. He takes a fingerprint left on a piece of glass, enhances it with a cyanoacrylate adhesive, and then photographs it with a digital camera. His more interesting experiment involves latent fingerprints. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. Matsumoto, along with his students at the Yokohama National University, showed that they can be reliably fooled with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of household supplies. For years the companies selling these devices have claimed that they are very secure, and that it is almost impossible to fool them into accepting a fake finger as genuine. These are security systems that attempt to identify people based on their fingerprint. Tsutomu Matsumoto, a Japanese cryptographer, recently decided to look at biometric fingerprint devices.