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.
This works because of a weakness in Apple's "liveness detection" feature, which allows users to unlock their iPhone with one glance, Threatpost reports .
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.
However, it does show the weaknesses behind the security and design of liveness detection and biometrics in general, researchers said.
"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 news comes after Apple announced it would pay $1 million to anyone can hack an iPhone, as part of its latest "bug bounty" programme.
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.
