The catch is that the attack requires the victim to be out cold
Apple’s FaceID authentication system has been bypassed in less than two minutes, using nothing but some tape and a pair of glasses.
At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, researchers from cyber security firm Tencent demonstrated how placing tape over the lenses of a pair glasses and placing them on the victim’s face allowed them to gain access to their iPhone.
The researchers discovered that liveness detection in FaceID renders the eye as a black area (the eye) with a white point on it (the iris).
Moreover, if FaceID detects that a user is wearing glasses, liveness detection doesn’t extract 3D information from the eye area.
Putting these two factors together, the researchers created a prototype pair of glasses – dubbed “X-glasses” – with black tape on the lenses, and white tape inside the black tape.
By placing these X-glasses on the sleeping victim’s face, they were able to bypass the attention detection mechanism of FaceID and gain access to their iPhone.
The attack comes with obvious drawbacks – not least the conundrum of trying to place a pair of glasses on a sleeping victim’s face without waking them up.
“With the leakage of biometric data and the enhancement of AI fraud ability, liveness detection has become the Achilles’ heel of biometric authentication security,” they said.
The aim of the programme is to enable Apple to get ahead of the hacker, by identifying potential security issues before they are exploited.
The $1 million reward is by far the highest bug bounty on offer from any major tech company.
source: Mirror
