Have you ever imagined this scenario:

You keep your valuables in a home safe, which you’ve secured with a fingerprint lock using your own fingerprint. One day, you open it to find it empty. Surveillance footage shows that someone used your fingerprint to open the safe—but not by cutting off your finger, but by using a silicone replica of your fingerprint.

This isn’t a scene from a movie. Fingerprints left on a glass or a doorknob can be extracted, molded, and replicated by someone with malicious intent—at a cost so low it’s hard to believe.

Traditional fingerprint recognition identifies the shape of the ridges. If the shape matches, it unlocks the door. As for whether the finger is real or made of silicone, it can’t tell the difference.

This is why CoreQ’s live fingerprint recognition technology is now being used in smart safes.

It can tell whether what you’re pressing against it is a real finger or not.

The principle behind it isn’t complicated.

Xinqihang’s fingerprint chip uses a glass substrate—unlike traditional silicon-based chips, glass is transparent. Leveraging this property, we’ve integrated a live-detection system into the product, which includes infrared emitters and receivers.

When you place your finger on the sensor, infrared light is emitted and then reflected back. The reflective characteristics of human skin tissue and silicone material under infrared light are completely different. The chip can detect this difference.

Fake fingerprints made of silicone can replicate the ridges, but they cannot mimic the optical characteristics. When a fake finger is placed on the sensor, it is immediately ignored.

Behind this technology lies CoreQ’s exclusive patent—the light-transmitting properties of the glass-based chip make live detection possible. Fingerprint recognition products equipped with this technology have passed the three major certifications from China’s Ministry of Public Security—algorithm, fingerprint scanner, and live detection—and have also obtained U.S. PBI-PIV certification and Microsoft certification.

When used on safes, the results are clear: whereas people used to worry about fingerprints being copied, that’s no longer a concern. Even if a fingerprint is copied, it’s useless—the fake one won’t open the safe.

There are a few other details worth mentioning. Dry fingers, wet fingers, cracked or peeling skin, and even slight dirt do not affect recognition. Even with shallow fingerprints in the elderly or blurry fingerprints in children, the recognition rate remains as high as 95%. The sensor has a lifespan of over 1 million presses—10 times that of standard silicon-based solutions. Given how many times a safe is opened daily, this ensures decades of reliable use.

It’s compact and energy-efficient, so it can be seamlessly embedded into the safe’s panel without taking up any extra space.

So if you’re shopping for a smart safe, or if you’re a safe manufacturer looking for a solution, keep this in mind: Does it feature live fingerprint recognition?

If not, a cloned fingerprint renders the safe door virtually useless.

If it does, you gain at least one extra layer of security—that finger has to be alive.