Hotels Near Doral Golf Resort - Hackers Claim To Have Defeated Apple's Fingerprint Security

Source      - http://www.forbes.com/
By            - Joseph Steinberg
Category   - Hotels Near Doral Golf Resort
Posted By - Homewood Suites Miami

Hotels Near Doral Golf Resort

Just one day after the new fingerprint-scanning Apple AAPL -1.07%iPhone-5s was released to the public, hackers claimed to have defeated the new security mechanism. After their announcement on Saturday night, the Chaos Computer Club posted a video on YouTube which appears to show a user defeating Apple’s new TouchID security by using a replicated fingerprint.

Apple has not yet commented on this matter, and, as far as I can tell, no third-party agency has publicly validated the video or the hacker group’s claim. In theory, the techniques used should not have defeated the sub-dermal analysis (analyzing three dimensional unique aspects of fingerprints rather than just two-dimensional surface images) that Apple was supposed to have used in its fingerprint scanner, but, as I mentioned in my article last week (Your New iPhone Can Put Your Identity At Risk), systems are not always implemented exactly as planned, and there are sometimes exploitable vulnerabilities that people may be strongly incented to find.

The video posted by the hacker group does not show the preparation of the replicated print used to inappropriately authenticate. In fact, the video may make the process of defeating the security seem far simpler than it is – creating a replicated print similar to the one the hackers apparently used to defeat the fingerprint sensor involves some work; lifting and printing a high-resolution mirror image of a print onto a surface (which seems to be what was done based on the video) is not something that the average user can easily do today. However, as I noted last week, if criminals stand to make significant money by doing so, they will quickly acquire the skills and the resources needed to achieve their goal.

Hence, if the technique claimed by the hackers is found to work (even if it works only some of the time), there is serious risk to any user using fingerprint authentication on its own. Coupled with the other risks that I described last week, as well as with the possibility that fingerprints and forced fingerprint authentication may not be protected by the Fifth Amendment, this new revelation makes me even more certain in my concerns about fingerprint authentication on smartphones.