Chinese hackers can hack any fingerprint scanner in 20 minutes

[Tomcat]

Users of almost any Android smartphone, as well as iPhone owners up to and including the iPhone 8, may be at risk. Chinese hackers claim they can hack any fingerprint scanner in just 20 minutes.

Experts demonstrated how a scanner can be hacked using $ 140 hardware and a custom fingerprint capture application.

A way to bypass authentication was discovered by a team of X-Lab researchers at Tencent. Experts demonstrated their scanner hacking technique at the GeekPwn 2019 conference held in Shanghai.

Chen Yu, the head of the X-Lab team, asked random conference attendees to touch the glass. Then the prints remaining on the glass were photographed using a smartphone and loaded into an application developed by the hackers.

The purpose of the app is to extract the data needed to clone a fingerprint. For this, presumably, a 3D printer is used. The experts did not disclose the exact method for security reasons.

However, the fingerprints forged in the process were used to unlock three different smartphones. It is worth noting that all three devices had different fingerprint scanning technologies: optical, ultrasonic and capacitive.

The whole process - from taking a picture of fingerprints to unlocking smartphones - took only twenty minutes from experts.

Yu later explained that his team was using a $ 142 piece of hardware.