Posted on 07/22/2016 6:51:45 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Authorities might find a way to access a dead man’s phone
If you believe that securing your phone with a fingerprint makes it impossible to hack, think again. Michigan police have recently asked the Michigan State University to produce a 3D replica of a dead man’s fingers in order to access his iPhone and collect data that is believed to contain evidence linked to an ongoing murder case.
Professor Anil Jain has been tasked with creating the 3D molds, and according to a report by Fusion, the project is advancing well so far, although in-lab testing is still being performed, and it’s not yet sure that the prints can unlock the iPhone.
With a long experience in facial recognition programs, fingerprint scanners, and tattoo matching, the Professor says that they are trying to build the 3D prints using the man’s fingerprints that already existed in the police database, as he was arrested in the past and his information was recorded. It’s not clear, however, why they aren’t using the fingers directly since they have the body.
Using the information provided by the police, the Professor has managed to build replicas of all 10 fingers because the investigators are not sure which finger the murdered man actually used to secure his phone.
“We don’t know which finger the suspect used. We think it’s going to be the thumb or index finger - that’s what most people use - but we have all ten,” the Professor is quoted as saying.Work to complete in coming weeks
In order to simulate the pressing of an actual finger, the Professor turned to a thin layer of metallic particles, which replicates the human skin and makes the fingerprint scanner read the print just like it were a real finger. They believe everything should work correctly and unlock the phone, but for the moment, they’re just testing everything in labs to be sure that no issue whatsoever is experienced.
Work on the 3D replicas is expected to complete in the coming weeks, and if successful, it can open the door for a new way of unlocking phones without any implication from the company that manufactured said devices.
Earlier this year, Apple refused to help the FBI break into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, claiming that this would set a dangerous precedent and would only create new risks for customers in the United States. The FBI eventually managed to unlock the phone with help from an undisclosed group of hackers, so Apple was no longer required to develop a backdoor to access data stored on it.
More recent updates made by Apple to iOS software, however, make it impossible even for fingerprint replicas to be used to unlock iPhones, as passwords are requested every 48 hours no matter what. So even if a 3D fingerprint is created, cracking the password would still be needed if the data isn’t extracted in due time.
Mythbusters already did this
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Any phone can be hacked.
Uh, no, they didn't. They got a simply optical computer fingerprint scanner to accept a fingerprint they made on back in 2011.
If you think Mythbusters could do it, why do you think the FBI and their experts could not do it to the New York drug dealer's iPhone, and they had HIS finger prints in hand. The FBI has some of the top experts in the world for doing this kind of stuff, far more experienced than any of the movie stunt and FX guys on Mythbusters, and they could NOT do it, certainly not within the 48 hour window of opportunity Apple provides for trying that kind of thing.
According to the white paper I read on TouchID which described how TouchID actually works, it reads the subcutaneous ridges and valleys of the fat pad under the skin, not the fingerprint itself. That's why a fingerprint reconstructed from something left and lifted from the environment simply won't work. There is no way of picking up that 3D data hidden under the skin. It also tests to see if the finger touching the sensor is living.
Really? Where are all the hacked iPhone exploits? If you can phish the user, get his passcode, then yes. But to actually get into a modern iPhone? No. The one they hackers got into from the San Bernardino Terrorists was an iPhone 5C, using the older SoC which was developed for the iPhone 4S from two years before instead of the far more secure iPhone 5S that was released at the same time as it was which had the TouchID and the Secure Enclave, yet even the 5C kept every one out for months and ALL iPhones from the 5S through the 6S plus have yet to be broken into. They are protected by 256bit AES Encryption. Unless you can find out what the user's passcode is, you are not going to decrypt that data in anything less than astronomical time frames.
You can make such simplistic statements as "Any phone can be hacked," Laz, but you lack proof. The FBI has hundreds of seized iPhones they'd like to get into which they have been totally unsuccessful in hacking. . . even after getting into the San Bernardino terrorists' iPhone. Police departments across the country asked for help in getting into the thousands of various vintage iPhones they have but they got just crickets in response from the FBI, because it was expensive to crack into an OLD less secure technology iPhone and because it was NOT a trivial thing to hack into even that, and the newer ones are at least a magnitude or two even more difficult to try hack into.
Why do you think they are trying so hard to REQUIRE back doors into these devices? It is not to get back doors into Android devices. Backdoors into those they've had for years.
everyone knows there is a secret password that will unlock Apple devices—
CupertinoFoamPartyTonite
nothing new about fake finger prints.
I assume they are used in
court all the time
Anyone who puts anything on their computer or phone or whatever they don’t want the government to see are stupid.
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