by Lucas Nolan at Breitbart
Researchers have reportedly discovered a new side-channel attack that can extract a person’s fingerprints from the sounds made when a finger swipes across a touchscreen.
Toms Hardware reports that researchers from institutions in China and the United States have outlined an innovative attack targeting biometric security in a paper entitled “PrintListener: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Authentication via the Finger Friction Sound.” This attack utilizes the audio characteristics of a finger gliding across a touchscreen to infer attributes of the fingerprint pattern.
fingerprint scanner ( Peter Macdiarmid /Getty)
Through testing, the scientists claim they can successfully extract “up to 27.9 percent of partial fingerprints and 9.3 percent of complete fingerprints within five tries at the highest security false acceptance rate setting of 0.01 percent.” The researchers claim that this is the first attack that uses swipe sounds to obtain fingerprint information.
Biometric fingerprint security is very common and highly trusted,…
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