Hackers over at the Chaos Computer Club have claimed successful bypass of Apple iPhone 5S’ TouchID using traditional means of defeating fingerprint security systems through the use of easily available everyday material and known methods.
CCC has explained the method through a post on their website website. The hackers have claimed that Apple’s TouchID is equipped a sensor that has higher resolution as compared to the ones available in the market and to successfully bypass it all they had to do was ramp up the resolution of the fake fingerprint.
Starbug, one of the hackers behind the TouchID bypass, said, “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.”
Internet news website, ParityNews was the first one to spot this and through a simple explanation of the process notes that the hackers “photographed a fingerprint from a glass surface, ramped up the resolution of the photographed fingerprint, inverted and printed the fingerprint using thick toner settings, smeared pink latex milk or white woodglue onto the pattern, lifted the latex sheet, moistened it a little and then placed it on the iPhone 5S’ fingerprint sensor to unlock the phone.”
The hackers are warning against the use of biometric security systems like fingerprint recognition. Frank Rieger, CCC spokesperson, said “It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token.”
You can check out a small demonstration video below:
