This paper investigates the security of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when mul- tiple fingerprints of a user are enrolled. A number of con- sumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, are beginning to incorporate fingerprint sensors for user authentication. The sensors embedded in these devices are generally small and the resulting images are, therefore, limited in size. To compensate for the limited size, these devices often acquire multiple partial impressions of a single finger during enrollment to ensure that at least one of them will successfully match
I skimmed the paper but I don't see which iPhone they were able to unlock with this method. Do you know if the resolution of the fingerprint scanner differs between iPhone models?
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7893784/?reload=true
PDF version:
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~rossarun/pubs/RoyMemonRossMasterPrin...
Abstract:
This paper investigates the security of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when mul- tiple fingerprints of a user are enrolled. A number of con- sumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, are beginning to incorporate fingerprint sensors for user authentication. The sensors embedded in these devices are generally small and the resulting images are, therefore, limited in size. To compensate for the limited size, these devices often acquire multiple partial impressions of a single finger during enrollment to ensure that at least one of them will successfully match