Fingerprint scanners have long been the norm for modern smartphones. Needless to say, even if state employees with a price of less than $ 100 today have a fingerprint, and even an NFC-module, which allows you to use them as payment instruments.
However, this prevalence has led many manufacturers to consider fingerprint recognition technology yesterday and tried either to replace it altogether, like Apple, or to improve it by integrating it directly into the display, like Chinese manufacturers. Guess who was right?
The fingerprint sensor is not the best way to protect a smartphone
Probably everyone who watched “The Treasure of the Nation” with Nicolas Cage in the title role remembers how simply his hero captured the fingerprint of an employee of the national archive.
To do this, he needed a glass to which she touched, and adhesive tape, on which the drawing was transferred. Of course, these manipulations are just a figment of the writers’ imagination, and it is impossible to do something like this in real life.
At least it was not possible earlier, but experts from the Chinese company Tencent, specializing in research in the field of cybersecurity, were able to repeat this trick, even in a more technological way.
How to crack a fingerprint scanner
Hacking a fingerprint scanner is possible. It only costs $ 140
Chen Yu, head of the X-Lab department, who was studying ways to bypass the protective mechanisms of fingerprint sensors, told that he and his colleagues managed to photograph a fingerprint left on a glass on a smartphone, which, after special processing, was possible to materialize.
Craftsmen do not specify how exactly they managed to get the physical embodiment of the fingerprint but specify that they spent 140 dollars and 20 minutes of pure time on this. Most likely, they used a 3D printer for this, as the enthusiast who managed to bypass the Galaxy S10 lock in a similar way.
According to Yu, the fingerprint that they managed to get allowed to unlock the three smartphones and two more unnamed devices protected by a fingerprint sensor. What is interesting, the expert specified, it was possible to crack not only the ultrasound scanner built into the screen but also the physical ones that are located on the smartphone case.
This means that in theory, the integration of the scanner with the display does not make it either less reliable or more secure. Unlike face recognition technology.
What is easier to crack: Touch ID or Face ID
Oddly enough, to circumvent in the same way the protection provided by hardware face recognition sensors, if not impossible, then much more complicated. Known that the taiwanese company bkav managed to trick the Face ID interface, iPhone X, using a three-dimensional mask of the conditional owner, printed on a 3D printer.
They could even imitate the openness of the eyes, painting them with oil paint and thus confirming that cracking Face ID is quite possible.
Another thing is that in order to print a person’s mask on a 3D printer, it is not enough just to photograph his face on a smartphone. To achieve maximum similarity, Bkav experts had to use several professional cameras that took several consecutive shots from different angles.
Then these photos were combined in a special editor on the computer and only after that they were sent to print. It goes without saying that it will be difficult to repeat the same not only from a technical point of view but also from a material point of view.