Crowdfunded Bounty For Hacking iPhone 5S Fingerprint Authentication

judgecorp writes "There's more than $13,000 pledged for a crowdfunded bounty for bypassing an iPhone 5S's fingerprint reader. The bounty, set up by a security expert and an exploit reseller, requires entrants to lift prints 'like from a beer mug.' It has a website — IsTouchIDHackedYet — and payments are pledged by tweets using #IsTouchIDHackedYet. One drawback: the scheme appears to rely on trust that sponsors will actually pay up." Other prizes include whiskey, books, and a bottle of wine.

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Re:Why bother.

[CastrTroy]

Personally, living in Canada, I wish they would stop coming up with inventions that don't work in the winter. First, it's capacitive touch screens that won't work with regular gloves. Now we have special gloves with a special material on the fingertips so that you can use your tablet/phone with gloves. Then there's eBook readers, which advertise as being still readable in sunlight, but if the screen gets too cold, they don't refresh properly. Now they have fingerprint readers on the phone. So I have to take my gloves off, just to make a phone call. I'm tired of my hands getting cold!

Re:'like from a beer mug'

[chihowa]

That's not an extensive explanation of how the technology works. The only description of how the sensor works from that article is this:

A capacitance fingerprint reader leverages a handy property of your skin: The outer layer of your skin (your dermis), where your fingerprint is, is non-conductive, while the subdermal layer behind it is conductive. When you touch the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor, it measures the minuscule differences in conductivity caused by the raised parts of your fingerprint, and it uses those measurements to form an image..

So it's still measuring your fingerprint as made up of ridges and troughs, just using conduction instead of optics. So you lift a fingerprint from a glass, etch it onto a conductive substrate (that matches the dermis roughly) and put it on the sensor.

The sensor is likely looking at a fairly wide range of relative conduction between the ridges and troughs, so that it will work if your fingers are oily or sweaty or cold, so you wouldn't need to perfectly match the conduction of the user's actual finger.

Re:Why bother.

[Kielistic]

Holes are known for their efficiency at losing heat. If frostbite is a concern do not poke holes in your insulation!