The other day it was reported that hackers had begun to crowdsource funding that would basically be prize money to anyone that would be able to hack Apple’s Touch ID sensor, a new security feature that has made its way onto the iPhone 5s. We expected that it might take a while but it looks like a hacker group called the Chaos Computer Club has since claimed that they have managed to bypass the security feature using “easy everyday means”. The hackers claim that while the method they used was relatively simple, it is complicated enough that most thieves will probably not have the time or resources to obtain the materials they need in order to bypass the sensor.
According to one of the hackers, Starbug, “In reality, Apple’s sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far […] So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake.” Basically what they did was that they reproduced a high-resolution photograph of a fingerprint and made a glue model of it, which was then used on the sensor itself which acknowledged the print and unlocked the device. Naturally bypassing the TouchID sensor using this method is not good for Apple and we’ll have to see what the Cupertino company has to say about this. In the meantime you can check out the video above to see the hack in action.