If you want to avoid having your iPhone broken into, keep your fingers hidden in pictures.
That’s one extreme takeaway from a European hacking group who say they can take simple photos of a person’s finger and use them to recreate a fingerprint that can then unlock an iPhone protected by a Touch ID fingerprint scanner.
As VentureBeat notes, the Chaos Computer Club demonstrated how it used photos of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen from a recent press conference and a program called VeriFinger to generate fingerprints that could bypass biometric authentication.
While the hackers haven’t yet used this method to fool Apple’s Touch ID system, one of them noted that “politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public” as a result of their findings.
As the video (in German) shows below, the entire hack is quite lengthly and arduous, so most of us probably don’t need to worry about exposed fingers in pictures. Nonetheless, it’s still an interesting hack.
