EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A Lansing murder left police baffled, and they believed a smartphone held answers to key questions. However, the phone was locked and required the victim's fingerprint to unlock it.
So the Lansing Police Department turned to Michigan State University's Digital Forensics Unit for help.
"We have a forensic lab here, all the software you need to get into phones, or at least most phones, and they didn't have those resources. So we were more than happy to help them out," detective Andrew Rathbun said.
Rathbun, a Holland native, said he used the typical tools available to try unlocking Joshua Misiak's phone. The 34-year-old was gunned down in May on Lansing's south side.
Rathbun said, "Nothing was able to get through it. Once I hit those walls, then I made some calls to try and figure out. Am I doing something wrong? Is there some capability that I'm not aware, and all these vendors basically told me that this technology does not exist. 'We can't even do it.'"
So like many of us looking for answers do today, Rathbun turned to Google. He learned there’s a technique known as "fingerprint spoofing," and the man who could do it was just a stones throw away on campus. MSU professor of computer science and electrical engineering Anil Jain accepted the challenge.
Jain said, "We said we need fingerprints of the person of interest, and they gave it to us. The person is dead, so it's not like they could force his finger on the phone."
Smartphone locks sense electrical conductivity, which is something a dead body can’t produce. Unsure of which fingertip the victim used to access the phone, Jain and his students requested all 10 fingerprints.
"We made first, a simple attempt to unlock it, by printing the fingerprints on a special conductive paper. It did not work," Jain explained.
He said fingerprint quality provided by police was too poor. So the MSU team digitally enhanced the prints — making the fingerprints 3D, using conductive material.
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Jain said, "Finally, after several attempts, we were able to unlock the phone and the police was extremely happy.
"They disabled the fingerprint feature and then turned the 1,2,3,4 passcode in the phone so they could easily retrieve the information."
Professor Jain said he advocates for increasingly tighter smart phone security, considering many people store personal, financial information on them.
As for the Lansing homicide case, police said it's an open investigation, no one has been arrested, and they wouldn't say if anything was found on the victim's phone.
