Samsung Galaxy finger print scanner can be hacked with ease
The fingerprint scanner on the new Samsung Galaxy S5 is one of its selling points, but it appears that the feature has fallen prey to hackers – with just a bit of wood glue and a latent print.
It took German “researchers” at SRLabs just four days to created a fake fingerprint using wood glue that can bypass the scanner on the brand new Samsung Galaxy S5. which was released last Friday. The iPhone 5S fingerprint scanner was hacked by Chaos Computer Club in only 48 hours using a very similar method.
Samsung Galaxy S5 is integrated with PayPal, and the fingerprint scanner is used to authorize transactions and money transfers in the device. So there is a lot more at stake if the scanner is hacked. PayPal issued a statement in regards to the security scare: “PayPal never stores or even has access to your actual fingerprint with authentication on the Galaxy S5. The scan unlocks a secure cryptographic key that serves as a password replacement for the phone. We can simply deactivate the key from a lost or stolen device, and you can create a new one.”
The researchers enrolled a fingerprint from a real finger on the S5, then used a mold of a fingerprint to unlock it—the same one used last year to spoof Apple’s TouchID. The video shows how Samsung’s implementation can be bypassed using a mold made under laboratory conditions, but it is based on nothing more than a camera phone photo of a latent print from a smartphone screen, SRLabs said.
