Newly launched Samsung Galaxy S8 facial recognition system hacked

Watch how Samsung Galaxy S8 iris scanner, face recognition system gets hacked

The world’s biggest smartphone maker recently launched their brand new flagship phones for the year 2017 and it didn’t take long for a user to find a security flaw leaving the devices open to misuse.

The devices in question here are the Samsung Galaxy S8 & S8+. Being the flagship these two devices usually display the best that Samsung has to offer. Both the devices come with IP68 dust and water resistance, a Quad HD display (2960 x 1440 ), 4 GB of RAM, 12 MP rear camera that is complimented by a 8 MP front camera, Android Nougat 7.0 and a host of other features. Just from that you can guess how big of a deal these 2 devices are.

Along with the above mentioned features, the devices also contain an iris scanner and face recognition along with a feature called Face Unlock which as it describes – let’s you unlock the device by recognizing your face. The face unlock feature is the one shown to have the loop hole. The feature makes use of your iris scans to authenticate you to use the device. However, an user named Marcianophone in a video has shown that the Samsung Galaxy S8 device can be unlocked by simply using a picture of the phone’s user rendering the Face Unlock feature useless.

In a video posted online, the user demonstrates this by taking a photo of the phone’s actual user and placing it in front of the camera. After a few moments of shaking the photo in front of the device, the device unlocks giving full access to the device. You can check out the video for yourself right here. 

On a side note though, Samsung might have had some fore sight of such misuse and has not allowed face recognition to be used in its Samsung Pay application. Considering Samsung Pay can contain information of even a user’s credit card, the company has smartly stepped around what might have been a situation worse than the recent Galaxy Note fiasco.