Breaking Laptop Fingerprint Sensors
They’re not that good:
Security researchers Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft’s own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we’ve reviewed in the last few years. It’s likely that most Windows PCs with fingerprint readers will be vulnerable to similar exploits.
Gunter Königsmann • November 29, 2023 8:33 AM
Actually if my fingerprint reader is 8mm wide, but has a perimeter wall around it that hinders me from using the outer millimeter, will detect some noise along with the picture it is supposed to see (connections between lines that aren’t connected, lines that kook like they are interrupted, big black or white spots and so on), my finger can be rotated along two axis and the sensor is trained on fimgers that have much more surface than the tiny window the sensor looks at: If I reliably pass that test the sensor cannot be too assertive.
My cellphone sensor only looks at ca. 20mm^2 of fingerprint. When training it I had to show it only 5 samples of each of the 4 fingers I trained it with. Now my 3 year old son can reliably unlock my cellphone even if it was trained with my fingerprints instead.