Posted by If you have been confident that your fingerprint secured smartphone is super safe, you need to pipe down a bit. Those movies in which a fingerprint security sensor is fooled using one trick or the other just became real. Your smartphone’s fingerprint security can be fooled and cracked in just 15 minutes by using just a color inkjet printer, a special type of paper and ink.
To demonstrate it, two researchers from Michigan State University’s biometrics group pulled off the trick on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Huawei Honor 7 and successfully fooled both. The main steps of this attack are summarized as follows:
- Photograph the fingerprint of the genuine user;
- Print the fingerprint on a transparent sheet with a thick toner setting;
- Create a “spoof fingerprint” (we referred to it as a 2.5D fingerprint) using latex milk or white
wood glue.
Simple as A, B, C.
Of course, this hack applies to not just the smartphones used in the demonstration. Virtually any smartphone with a fingerprint sensor can be fooled this way. And all you need to pull it off costs just $500. The iPhone’s fingerprint sensor has been hacked too, so what again?
Download the report read the details (PDF).
Founder of MobilityArena. Yomi’s journey in mobile started in 2001. Besides obsessing over mobile phones, he also started creating WAP sites (early mobile-friendly websites created with WML). He began writing about phones in 2004 and has been at it since then. He has owned over 200 devices, from Symbian, Palm, PocketPC/Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/BB10, webOS, Windows Phone, Firefox, Ubuntu Touch, to Android, iOS, and KaiOS operating systems.
Unless you’re in the business of re-selling stolen high end phones, or unlock a lot of locked phones for people, that would be $500 wasted.
More and more there are workarounds to unlocking devices using finger print scanning. Will it lead to less people using them? I doubt it.