Hacker bypasses the iris-scanner in the Samsung Galaxy S8 with a contact lens and printed photo

Starbug placed a contact lens on the image to fool the iris-scanner into thinking that the photo is an actual human face with eyes.

Tech2 News Staff|May 24, 2017, 16:56:45 IST

Every time a smartphone maker introduces a new security feature to improve security and privacy, people term the feature as gimmicky and unnecessary. This is not the first time that a feature has been termed useless while in its initial stages. People shared the same opinion when the fingerprint scanner was being introduced in smartphones.More recently the iris scanner that Samsung packed in the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ has been termed gimmicky without any real world application or protection. Samsung claimed that the advanced iris scanner can not be beaten by things like a photo printout to unlock and bypass the security lock.

However, a hacker by the name of ‘Starbug’, also known as Jan Krissler has managed to bypass the security provided by iris-scanner using a relatively low-tech hack as reported by The Verge. The hacker captured an infrared picture of a face of a person using the night mode setting available in a normal point and shoot camera and took a print out of the picture. The company claimed that breaking the security was not as easy as scanning a picture of a person and then showing it in front of the iris scanner.Considering that, Starbug placed a contact lens on the image to fool the iris-scanner into thinking that the photo is an actual human face with eyes. Even though, this way takes more effort to break the security that other methods but it still is quite easy. The interesting thing to note here is that this is not the first hack done by Starbug. He was the first one to bypass the TouchID introduced by Apple along with recreating the fingerprint of Ursula von der Leyen, just by the pictures of the fingers,

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