14 DAY TRIAL // While OnePlus itself offers a disclaimer for the face recognition system on the OnePlus 6, admitting that passwords are the most secure protection system on its devices, there’s no doubt that this new feature is one very convenient method to easily unlock smartphones.
But as it turns out, the disclaimer is there for a good reason, as face unlocking can be easily fooled using nothing else than a printed photo of the owner.
An experiment conducted by @rikvduijn on Twitter shows just how easy it is to bypass face unlock on the newly-launched OnePlus 6, and all you need is a printed picture of the user who was enrolled in the facial recognition system.
No pre-training was made to help the device learn the printed photo, and by the looks of things, this “hack” also works with black and white photos, as long as the face of the owner is used.
OnePlus uses facial recognition technology from China-based SenseTime, a company that has a long and rather controversial background in this field. SenseTime is also involved in building facial recognition tech for CCTV cameras for Chinese authorities.
Other phones fooled as well
And while this might sound like a big deal, bypassing face unlock with a printed photo isn’t something that’s only happening to OnePlus.
Similar “hacks” were previously discovered on other Android phones offering facial recognition as well, including the Samsung Galaxy S8. Samsung, however, rolled out updates to block this kind of exploit, eventually making its face unlock a bit harder to bypass.
But at this point, Apple’s iPhone X offers what’s pretty much the most advanced facial recognition system to date. With dedicated 3D sensing cameras that use IR dot mapping to create a map of the face, Apple’s feature has until now proved the toughest to date, even though researchers have shown that with advanced 3D masks, this system can be fooled as well.
I printed my face to unlock my OnePlus 6 for the lulz... it worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/rAVMq8JKBr — rik (@rikvduijn) May 29, 2018