Holiday In West Miami - The iPhone 5s TouchID Fingerprint Hack Doesn't Matter

Source      - http://www.fool.com/
By             - Malcolm Manness
Category    - Holiday In West Miami
Posted By  - Inn and Suites In West Miami

Holiday In West Miami

Apple  (NASDAQ: AAPL  )  is in fierce competition in the smartphone market with Android OS by Google and, to a lesser degree, Windows Phone 8 by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT  ) . Both competitors have been gaining smartphone market share over Apple's iOS-driven iPhone, and in this race, perception as an innovator is crucial to continued success. New features need to draw significant attention. But they can't compromise security.

The new iPhone 5s

The new iPhone 5s has made quite a stir by introducing two new technologies that leave Android and WP8 phones behind. The first is a 64-bit CPU, something no other smartphone can boast.

Tests by the respected site AnandTech have shown that the 5s is very fast, handily beating competitors in most of the benchmarks. On the Geekbench benchmark, an overall computational set, gains were mixed, except in one important area – cryptographic tests: AES over 800%, and SHA1 245% improvements.

The AES and SHA1 gains are a direct result of the new cryptographic instructions that are a part of ARMv8. The AES test in particular shows nearly an order of magnitude performance improvement. [Emphasis added.]

One wonders what Apple has in mind for cryptographic services.

Apple's TouchID

One possibility, of course, is the second radical improvement, the fingerprint scanner, dubbed TouchID, that allows you to open your locked iPhone without needing to enter your password. Reviewers have hailed this as a great advance.

It should be noted that Motorola – now a part of Google – used to have a phone model, Atrix 4G, that used fingerprint scanning, but it was both awkward and so unreliable that they discontinued the feature . By most accounts, Apple's TouchID system works simply and reliably.

The Chaos Computer Club

The Chaos Computer Club is "Europe's largest association of hackers." They quickly developed a method to fool the fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5s, and released a statement:

The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.

Basically they took a fingerprint off of glass, scanned it under fairly high resolution, then used that image to make a latex spoof. It is easy to do and anyone can do it at home with inexpensive equipment.