This should be the last thing Samsung might want to hear. Just when they would have been celebrating back in Seoul the huge victory with the latest flagships Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, comes the bad news from Germany. The Iris Scanner on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus is not that secure after all. A professional hacking group based out of Germany, ‘Chaos Computer Club’, has posted the details of how they managed to beat the scanner by clicking a photograph of the owner whose eye is registered with the phone’s Iris Scanner and took a printout of the image on a normal laser printer and then used a contact lens to represent the curve of the human eye and voila, the Iris Scanner on the Galaxy S8 unlocked the phone!
To mention this process in more detail, the photograph was shot from a distance of 5 meters and a close-up of the eye was printed out.
Now this could mean serious trouble for Samsung. The company has reacted to the information and said it is probing the issue. It has also mentioned that the image of the eye from the camera has to be very perfect; in fact, it feels only an IR camera can do the job. But the German group has demonstrated that what they used was a simple aim and shoot camera. But once the common people out there start doubting the bio-metric security of a premium device like the Samsung Galaxy S8, then it can have a spiralling effect on the sales of the phone. What’s more, people might be using these phones for digital payments, including for Samsung Pay and other payment gateways.
It is worth being mentioned that the Samsung Galaxy S8 features a facial recognition security provision as well; however, this was proved to be a non-starter even before the S8 went on sale. It is also to be noted that the same CCC hacking group had proved that the iPhone 5’s fingerprint sensor could be fooled using graphite powder and so on.
The problem is, it could be more difficult to obtain someone’s fingerprints than to take a photograph. In a lighter vein, the hacking team from Germany has mentioned that they just needed a camera, a laser printer and a contact lens and the most expensive item in their experiment was the Samsung Galaxy S8 phone itself. They further added salt into Samsung’s wounds by saying that they found the Samsung printers yielding the perfect prints that could be used in the hacking process!
It's up to Samsung now for an early resolution of this serious security breach on their most prestigious phone.