During the last years, phone companies have implemented thousands of ways to secure their phones, such as fingerprint sensors, face mapping and even sensors that map out blood veins from the palm of your hand. There are still ways though to overcome those security walls and that’s what a Samsung Galaxy S10 user did, when he printed his 3D fingerprint and fooled his fingerprint sensor.
In a post on Imgur, user darkshark outlined his project: he took a picture of his fingerprint on a wineglass, processed it in Photoshop, and made a model using 3ds Max that allowed him to extrude the lines in the picture into a 3D version. After a 13-minute print (and three attempts with some tweaks), he was able to print out a version of his fingerprint that fooled the phone’s sensor.
The Galaxy S10 fingerprint sensor doesn’t use the previous model capacitive fingerprint sensor it used on its previous versions of Galaxy S, but instead it’s using an ultrasonic sensor that’s apparently more difficult to spoof. That’s what DarkShark did as it didn’t took much for him to spoof his fingerprint sensor.
A concern, he notes, is that payment and banking apps are increasingly using the authentication from a fingerprint sensor to unlock, and all he needed to get into his phone was a photograph, some software, and access to a 3D printer. “I can do this entire process in less than 3 minutes and remotely start the 3d print so that it’s done by the time I get to it,” he writes.
This is surely not the first time someone tries (and succeeds) to spoof his mobile. Police officers used a 3D print in 2016 to get into a murder victim’s phone, while a cybersecurity firm used a $150 face mask beat Apple’s FaceID on an iPhone X in 2017. As my colleague Russel l Brandom noted a couple of years ago, fingerprints aren’t as secure as you’d think — they can get stolen and spoofed, even on the most advanced phones.
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