A security researcher has canceled a presentation at Black Hat Asia on hacking biometric facial recognition (Face ID) in iPhones of Apple, at the request of his employer.
The prospect of cracking Face ID is alarming enough because it's used to lock down features on tens of millions of iPhones from banking and healthcare apps to email post officeh, text and photos.
According to Apple, the chance to accidentally unlock a device that is protected by Face ID is one in a million, as opposed to the Touch ID that was one in 50.000.
Wu Wu, a researcher from China, was scheduled to present a speech entitled "Bypass Strong Face ID: Everyone Can Deceive Depth and IR Camera and Algorithms" at the Black Hat Asia conference to be held in Singapore in March. Wu told Reuters that his employer, Ant Financial, has asked him to withdraw the presentation from Black Hat.
Why; Ant Financial's Alipay payment system is compatible with face recognition technologies such as Face ID.
Note that since Apple released the 2017 security feature with the iPhone X, the company released three other phones that are protected by Face ID: iPhone XS, XS Max and XR.
Wu said to Reuters that he agreed to withdraw his presentation by indicating that he was able to play hack only on the iPhone X under certain conditions and that it did not work on iPhone XS and XS Max.
"To ensure the credibility and maturity of the research results, we have decided to cancel the speech," he told Reuters with a message on Twitter.
"OR research about the facial identity verification mechanism is incomplete and would be misleading if presented,” Ant Financial said.
The organizers of Black Hat naturally withdrew a speech summary from the event's website at the end of December, when Ant Financial revealed the research problems.
- What is Software, Hardware and Motherboard RAID? Guide for Beginners
- What is RAID? Guide for Beginners
The fact of withdrawing a presentation from the Black Hat page is very rare. The organizers of the conference told Reuters that they accepted Wu's presentation because he persuaded them that he could do it.
"Black Hat accepted the speech because it believed that the hack could be reproduced based on the materials available to the researcher," said conference spokeswoman Kimberly Samra.
Anil Jain again, an IT professor of State University in Michigan, a facial recognition expert, said he was surprised by Wu's claim because Apple has invested so much in "anti-spoofing" technology that makes such hacks very difficult.
________________________
- Google builds its own village with 8000 homes
- iPhone X Face ID: banks say no to technology
- Microsoft Edge fail: What does the browser do?
- Hackers violate Chromecasts and warn their owners
- Open Sesame: Windows hack with voice command
- Google changes to the Terms of Service
