Tek Tok Canada Canadian Technology News & Reviews
Well it has been only 2 days since Apple released the latest iPhone to the public and already a hacker group based out of Germany claims to have hacked the finger print scanner. The first thing I asked the Apple rep when I purchased my iPhone 5S was is it not possible to lift the print with tape or something and re-apply? Well it looks like I was on to something.
“Fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints,” a hacker named Starbug was quoted as saying on the CCC’s site.
The group said it defeated Touch ID by photographing the fingerprint of an iPhone’s user, then printing it on to a transparent sheet, which it used to create a mold for a “fake finger.”
The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple’s TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.
Apple had released the new iPhone with a fingerprint sensor that was supposedly much more secure than previous fingerprint technology. A lot of bogus speculation about the marvels of the new technology and how hard to defeat it supposedly is had dominated the international technology press for days.
In reality, Apple’s sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake”, said the hacker with the nickname Starbug, who performed the critical experiments that led to the successful circumvention of the fingerprint locking. “As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints.
A short video was also released:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM8b8d8kSNQ
If this is true, it is possible CCC would qualify for the $10, 000 bounty being offered to successfully hack the Touch ID feature.
Source: CCC
