Apple announced its iPhone X a few years back with a unique feature called Face ID. This would replace the famous Touch ID which is basically Apple’s fingerprint scanning technology. Touch ID is currently replaced with Face ID which is a face unlock technology with biometric sensors.
Now, we have seen Android devices with a faster face unlock mechanism but they are not secure. Because they just use software to scan faces while Apple has dedicated hardware.
However, we have seen several instances where Face ID can be fooled. This particularly works when you have identical twins or brothers and sisters looking the same as you. But you might have also seen that Apple’s Face ID struggles while wearing sunglasses. Security Researchers at Tencent have now found a way to fool Apple’s Face ID while wearing glasses.
The security researchers analyzed how Face ID scans the human face when they are wearing glasses. They found that Face ID creates a black square box inside the glasses which are human eyes and a small white box inside which is human retina.
Researchers then did the same on normal glasses by placing a bigger black sticker and smaller white sticker of exact sizes. To their surprise, Apple’s Face ID would detect it as a human eye and give access to iPhones.
This means that if you place those spectacles on the person owning that iPhone even when their eyes closed, it would still give access. While this is still difficult, security researchers said that this works well when a person is unconscious.
But this method will not work if the face is different from that of the owner because Face ID scans other parts of the face too. We know that this is a security vulnerability but we think there is nothing Apple can do here as this is how the Face ID works.