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).
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.