Hamburg: Hackers are no longer sitting in their rooms looking for codes to crack. They are smarter than the eye can see and in the latest annual meeting of hackers in Germany, the wiz smart thieves have shown just how they play.
Jan Krissler, known in hacker circles as Starbug, demonstrated his method for faking fingerprints using only a few high-definition photographs of his target, German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen.
A speaker at the Chaos Communication Congress, Krissler, used commercial software called VeriFinger and several close-range photos of von der Leyen, including one gleaned from a press release issued by her own office and another he took himself from three meters away, to reverse-engineer the fingerprint.
There was another security hole, revealed at the conference, seemingly straight out of science-fiction: a so-called “corneal keyloggerâ€. The idea behind the attack is simple. A hacker may have access to a user’s phone camera, but not anything else. How to go from there to stealing all their passwords?
One way, demonstrated on stage, is to read what they’re typing by analysing photographs of the reflections in their eyes. Smartphone cameras, even front-facing ones, are now high-resolution enough that such an attack is possible.
The increasing number of successful attacks against biometric identification has led to some security researchers advising that people change the way they think about security measures such as fingerprints and photo ID.
Rather than treating them as a replacement for passwords, they should instead be used as a second factor of authentication, or even as something similar to a username: a publicly known piece of information which must be linked to a password before a user can log in.