OnePlus 7 Pro In-Display Fingerprint Sensor Hacked In Minutes With Glue
Biometric security measures are improving all the time, though they are not infallible. This is demonstrated on the recently launched OnePlus 7 Pro. It has a fingerprint sensor that is embedded in the full-front display, and with a little bit of glue and a few minutes of time, it can be easily thwarted. Well, sort of.
The process itself is rather simple. It basically entails creating a rudimentary mold of a fingerprint using aluminum foil, a dab of hot glue, and a little bit of Elmer's glue. It's a cheap hack, in other words, albeit an effective one on the OnePlus 7 Pro. Incidentally, the same method was proven to work on the previous generation OnePlus 6T.
YouTube channel Max Tech demonstrated the hack. All it entailed was putting a dab of hot glue on a piece of aluminum foil, wetting the thumb, and pressing a fingerprint into the glue. After it dries, it can be filled in with Elmer's glue, then gently peeled off the aluminum foil. The result is a mold of a fingerprint that is detected by the OnePlus 7 Pro.
It's a rather quick and easy hack, at least in principal. To actually put this to use, however, it becomes far more difficult. After all, it's not as though OnePlus 7 Plus owners are going to volunteer their fingerprints to a hacker (Protip: if someone asks you to press your finger in a dab of glue, decline the request). So in that regard, this is not really a practical hack.
Nevertheless, this does demonstrate the limitation of fingerprint scanning technology, as implemented in the OnePlus 7 Pro. Incidentally, the same method is ineffective on Samsung's Galaxy S10+. That's likely because Samsung implemented an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. It's slower than the optical sensor in the OnePlus 7 Pro, but captures additional depth data for a 3D scan that is a bit more secure.
