Pierluigi Paganini September 29, 2013

The Iranian group defeated the very basic phenomenon of an iPhone Fingerprinting scanner  which allows them to hack TouchID with multiple Fingerprints also on iOS 7_0_2 .

An Iranian group of iPhone Geeks managing the blog i-Phone.ir defeated the very basic phenomenon of an iPhone Fingerprinting scanner, which allows them to unlock an iPhone device with multiple Fingerprints.  The news has been provided in exclusive by the colleagues at The Hackers News security portal that were contacted by the Iranian group.

The new is embarrassing for Apple firm that known for the reliability of its products and the care of security issues.

The new Apple‘s iPhone 5s was recently presented as a new device that includes a powerful feature, a biometrics-based security system called “Touch ID” that read the user’s fingerprint to unlock the phone.

The feature was immediately criticized, many security experts and advocates consider it a violation of user’s privacy, but the troubles were just began. The TouchId features were soon compromised, Germany Hackers of Chaos Computer Club demonstrated how they were able to deceive Apple’s security feature into believing they’re someone they’re not, using a well-honed technique for creating a latex copy of someone’s fingerprint.

The same fate befell the popular iOS 7 just released, the lockscreen feature in reality was not properly working allowing an attacker with physical access to the handset to make calls and access to the user’s data. Too much for a company like Apple!

The company promptly proposed an upgrade for its popular iOS 7, but while all the iPhone users are celebrating for the efficiency of Appleanother tile strikes on their heads.

As remarked by THN post another interesting fact is that, Touch ID is not only designed to scan the fingerprints of your fingers, it works with various human body parts and appendages which are also not fingers.

The concept behind the hack proposed by the Iranian group (Bashir Khoshnevis , Mohsen Lotfi , Shayan Khabazian and other members of i-Phone.ir support team) is that “No two Fingerprints are exactly alike”.

In the following video a proof of concept provided to The Hacker News in which the Group set up a mixed Fingerprint scan of 5-6 people for an iPhone 5S handset that allowed all of them to unlock the device with their individual fingerprints.

 

 

 

The curious data is that Apple  officially declared that TouchID technology will misread 1 finger every 50,000, this is because Touch ID is designed to unlock the device with partial part of the scan, this means that providing a merged thumbscan of multiple users to the unlock settings of an iPhone it will be able to read at least some partial scan of an individual user.

Does the newest iOS 7_0_2 firmware  fix the issue?

Apple released a couple of days ago the new iOS 7_0_2 firmware release to fix the security issues discussed, but the hack proposed by the Iranian Team works also on the iOS 7_0_2 as demonstrated by researchers at the THN  “Wang Wie” and “Jiten Jain“.  The researchers tested the hack procedure on iOS 7_0_2 firmware and it worked successfully.

Concluding, it is clear that Apple released too hastily the new patch for the security issues affected its new iOS 7, it is curious that bugs like this last one works on a system just patched. In the specific case it’s clear that Apple hasn’t implemented properly biometric authentication … meantime I suggest the use of old passcode to protect the user’s device.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Apple, iOS 7_0_2)