Abstract-Due to the growing use of biometric technologies inour modern society, spoofing attacks are becoming a seriousconcern. Many solutions have been proposed to detect the use offake "fingerprints" on an acquisition device. In this paper, wepropose to take advantage of intrinsic features of friction ridgeskin: pores. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential ofusing pores to detect spoofing attacks.Results show that the use of pores is a promising approach. Fourmajor observations were made: First, results confirmed that thereproduction of pores on fake "fingerprints" is possible. Second,the distribution of the total number of pores between fake andgenuine fingerprints cannot be discriminated. Third, thedifference in pore quantities between a query image and areference image (genuine or fake) can be used as a discriminatingfactor in a linear discriminant analysis. In our sample, theobserved error rates were as follows: 45.5% of false positive (thefake passed the test) and 3.8% of false negative (a genuine printhas been rejected). Finally, the performance is improved byusing the difference of pore quantity obtained between adistorted query fingerprint and a non-distorted referencefingerprint. By using this approach, the error rates improved to21.2% of false acceptation rate and 8.3% of false rejection rate.