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Hackers Unlock Any Phone Using Photographed Fingerprints In Just 20 Minutes
According to the Chinese blog Abacus, Tencent's X-Lab team showed how this technique works at the recent GeekPwn 2019 hacking conference in Shanghai. X-Lab's leader Chen Yu asked an audience member to touch a glass and took a photo of the fingerprints.
Yu then ran the photo through an app they have developed in house, which extracts and process the necessary data to clone a physical fingerprint. The team didn't show the physical cloning process, but we can assume that they used a 3D printer like other people have done in the past. He then proceeded to use the cloned fingerprint to open three smartphones that had been registered with the audience member's fingerprint — plus two event registration machines that use fingerprint scanners.
[...] Each of those phones used one of the three existing fingerprint scanning technologies: capacitive, optical. and ultrasonic, like the one in the Samsung Galaxy S10. The latter one is especially worrying, since this technology is supposed to avoid this type of hack by scanning the three-dimensional structure of your fingerprint.
[...] In other words: fingerprint security sucks. And facial identification is not that much better, really. If you are really worried about security, the only thing you can do is probably use a longer password.
Still harder than shoulder-surfing or having no password, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:49PM (1 child)
This is wrong. Passwords are the best form of security overall, as long as they are implemented properly. There is no "arms race," not really. Passwords are as strong as the implementation they use, sometimes the implementation is weak. Good implementations are well understood and available freely. While many hashing functions eventually get broken, this comes with literally years of advance warning, making it easy to upgrade the hash.
The biggest problem with passwords is the reuse of weak passwords, which requires the user to break two of the three characteristics that make up a good authentication factor for the sake of their convenience. System builders insisting on passwords that are easy for computers to break but hard for humans to remember is part of the problem as this encourages users to do just that.
Even if you assume that password databases are always stolen, which isn't even a terrible assumption, they are still better than biometrics, which are equally easily stolen, except that a breach of your biometric data permanently breaks it forever no matter what you do. It's the same as if, after someone stole your password, instead of having to change it, you had to use that same password everywhere for the rest of your life.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:02PM
Wait a second, please. Let me be clear that I have NOT claimed that biometrics are somehow better than passwords. My only claim here, is that using both biometrics and a good password will improve your security. If I were to compare the relative virtues of biometrics and passwords, I would have to say that passwords are almost certainly better. As you say, don't use a weak password.
The near ultimate security scheme? Biometrics unlocks the screen, which immediately asks you to enter your password. That is, no one should ever get to the log-in screen before the system screens them biometrically. Password taken care of - you're asked for your dongle thingie, whether it be a chip card, USB key, or whatever. Three factor authentication, and if you can't get one of the three, you don't get in.
For the really ultimate in security, 3 successive failed attempts to access the system results in the device melting down irrecoverably. That was a concern when the FBI was trying to get into the phone from the Inland shooting incident.