Samsung S8 Facial Scanner Can be Unlocked…With A Selfie

By
Wen Xianda
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It hasn’t even been a week since the unveiling of Samsung’s newest S8 smartphone, and somebody has already discovered a glaring security issue.

One of the spanking new features the S8 boasts, is a facial recognition unlocking function. In addition to the PIN, fingerprint and iris unlock functions, Samsung has introduced facial recognition to unlock your phone.

Unfortunately, bloggers at Marcianophone, a Spanish site, discovered that you could unlock an S8 just with a picture of the owner’s face, i.e. a selfie.

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Here’s a video of some guys from iDeviceHelp testing the trick out.

It takes a short while, but the phone is eventually unlocked just by flashing the selfie somewhere above the S8.

To be fair, the phones tested to be vulnerable in this manner were not final products, so it is entirely possible Samsung is still working on improving the software. In any case, it is probably not a good idea to depend on the facial recognition entirely.

Notably, a similar feature had been leaked for the upcoming iPhone 8. It is said that the newest iPhone will have laser-based facial recognition capabilities, which can apparently detect the 3D features of objects (like your face). This would mean that their facial recognition system wouldn’t be vulnerable to flat images.

If that turns out to be true, Samsung is going to have to up their game.

Here’s hoping that the S8 would be shipped without these vulnerabilities. I was actually thinking of changing over from LG (sorry LG I still love you).

Since you’re here, why not check out Goody Feed’s YouTube videos as well? They’re so Singaporean, I bet you’ll like them!

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Featured Image: newatlas.com

This article was first published on goodyfeed.com

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Wen Xianda
Email: [email protected]