Finger vein recognition is a recent biometric application, which relies on the use of human finger vein patterns beneath the skin's surface. While several methods have been proposed in the literature, its applicability to uncontrolled scenarios has not yet been shown. To this purpose this paper first introduces the VERA database, a new challenging publicly available database of finger vein images. This corpus consists of 440 index finger images from 110 subjects collected with an open device in an uncontrolled way. Second, an evaluation of state-of-the-art finger vein recognition systems is performed, both on the controlled UTFVP database and on the new VERA database. This is achieved using a new open source and extensible framework, which allows fair and reproducible benchmarks. Experimental results show that challenging recording conditions such as misalignments of the fingers lead to an absolute degradation in equal error rate of 2.75% up to 24.10% on VERA when compared to the best performances on UTFVP.