Apple's Advanced Fingerprint Technology

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Apple's advanced fingerprint technology is hacked; should you worry?

It took only days for the hackers of Germany’s Chaos Computer Club to claim victory in the challenge to break Apple’s vaunted new security feature in the iPhone 5s. The CCC “biometrics hacking team” used a photo of a fingerprint from a glass surface to fashion a fake finger that they then used to fool the newest iPhone into unlocking. “This demonstrates – again,”  the group said in a statement, “that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.”

Actually, it demonstrates no such thing.

The new iPhone debuted on Friday, September 20. The CCC team announced their successful hack roughly 48 hours later. But if you think this is a crushing defeat for Apple, think again. Apple's technology is good enough for most common applications. But no fingerprint reader is unhackable.

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Biometric information like fingerprints and retina scans are useful pieces of a multi-factor authentication puzzle. Although the CCC claims they used “materials that can be found in almost every household,” it’s unlikely that many households have the imaging technology to capture a fingerprint in a 2400 dpi photograph, clean up the resulting image and print it at 1200 dpi “onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting,” and then “smear pink latex milk or white woodglue” into the pattern to make a fake finger like the one that successfully bypassed the security of Touch ID.

Despite the slightly high-end lab equipment, this isn’t exactly rocket science. The source fingerprint probably looked like this


And the lab bench where the fake finger was created probably looked something like this:

Cool, huh? Except those pictures aren't from the CCC. They're from a similar hack that was publicized more than a decade ago. Back in 2003, another group led by researchers Antti Kaseva and Antti Stén posted an almost identical description of a fingerprint hack using a Windows-based fingerprint scanner that was, at the time, state of the art: