Samsung Galaxy S8 facial recognition system to unlock the device can be bypassed with a photo

Users can unlock Samsung Galaxy S8 phone by holding their Samsung Galaxy S8 in front of their eyes or their face … or their image.

It looks like a film already seen, an IT giant presents a new product and hackers defeat its security measures. This time we are speaking of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, that has been presented at the Unpacked 2017 event this week in New York, a jewel that includes both IRIS and Facial Recognition features. These features will improve the security of the owner and experience making it simple for them to unlock their device and signing into websites.

The users can unlock their phone by holding their Samsung Galaxy S8 or Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus in front of their eyes or their face.

Cool, but we have already seen in the past that the biometric technology could be bypassed by hackers, including fingerprint scanners and IRIS scanners.

Similar problems seem to affect the implementation of biometric technology used by Samsung to allow facial recognition. YouTube vlogger iDeviceHelp posted a video on his channel, in which the user Marcianotech demonstrated how to unlock a Samsung Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8 Plus getting the device owner’s picture from Facebook and presenting the image to the locked phone.

Currently, there is no exact information about the image definition used in the test, neither the distance between the phone and the camera.

The company hasn’t commented the video, probably because it is still working on the feature and the software tested is likely to be a beta version. For sure Samsung will address the problem before the device will be available on the market on April 21.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Samsung Galaxy S8, authentication)

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