Galaxy S10’s Fingerprint Sensor Spoofed by 3D Print: Report

“…if the spoofing claim is legitimate, it’s another indication of the importance of liveness detection in contemporary biometric technology.

New spoofing claims are raising questions about the efficacy of the Samsung Galaxy S10’s in-display fingerprint scanner.

As SamMobile reports, an Imgur user called “darshark” has published a post detailing how claims to have fooled one of Samsung’s flagship devices using 3D printing technology. Essentially, he snapped a picture of his fingerprint on a wine glass, edited the photo to emphasize details pertaining to height and depth, then printed a 3D image of his fingerprint, which was able to unlock his device.

There are some important caveats here. The Imgur user acknowledged that it took him three attempts to successfully spoof his Galaxy S10. His experiment hasn’t yet been replicated or validated by third party experts. And he had the advantage of using his own device and fingerprint, though in theory it should be possible to capture and replicate another person’s fingerprint using the same approach.

In any case, if the spoofing claim is legitimate, it’s another indication of the importance of liveness detection in contemporary biometric technology. Along those same lines, the claim also points to the advantages of multimodal biometrics – an advantage that the Galaxy S10 does have, with its support for facial recognition, compared to Apple’s mono-modal approach with its Face ID system, which has also seen at least one elaborate spoofing claim.

Source: SamMobile