A research team has found that so-called “masterprints” can successfully defeat fingerprint sensors on certain smartphones. Departments at the New York University and Michigan State University created fingerprints digitally composed of many common features found in human prints, reported the New York Times. Called masterprints, these were then used for presentation attackes on phones, with the team saying it could match real prints similar to those used by phones as much as 65 percent of the time. “It’s almost certainly not as worrisome as presented, but it’s almost certainly pretty darn bad,” said Andy Adler, a professor of systems and computer engineering at Carleton University in Canada, who studies biometric security systems, told the newspaper. “If all I want to do is take your phone and use your Apple Pay to buy stuff, if I can get into 1 in 10 phones, that’s not bad odds.” “It’s as if you have 30 passwords and the attacker only has to match one,” said Nasir Memon, a professor of...