Do You Think Your Smartphone Is Secure With Fingerprint Sensor? Think Again!

With smartphones companies allowing people a convenience to perform multiple tasks and purchase transactions over their smartphone, also opens the door for hackers, crackers, intruders and other costly exploits that you might have not been known to. And, especially when the hacker found out easy ways to create fake fingerprints to fool a smartphone fingerprint scanner.

On the other side, a market research firm IHS claims approximately the number of fingerprint sensors embedded in smartphone devices is expected to grow from 316 million in 2014 to 1.6 billion in 2020. 

Popular smartphone brands like Apple and Samsung are making it easy for people to perform crucial transactions-fingerprints authentication is no longer limited to unlocking smartphones. It also can  be used to make mobile payments and even authenticate bigger settlements that include large bank transfers too. Fingerprint scanner technology being one of the most convenient ways to unlock smartphones, has been around since the year 2000 for login authentications and identification to computer access. Today, this biometric technology allows you to secure your smartphones access too! If you are already using fingerprint recognition to get into your smartphone data, might not be secure as you may think.The biometric sensors embedded in smartphones are generally small and therefore the resulting images are limited in size.

To compensate, some devices often acquire multiple partial impression of a single finger during enrolment to make sure at least one of stored templates matches successfully for authentication. This was claimed by researchers from New York University and Michigan State University in an abstract that was carried out to explore the possibility of generating a “MasterPrint” that can match on or even more stored templates for a significant number of users. So, the question you need to ask yourself: is it really safe to use fingerprint scanner technology to lock and unlock your smartphone, especially when you store your personal and even sensitive data on it ?

Back in 2011, Motorola Atrix 4G users were the first among the other smartphone owners to adopt the fingerprint security function over their phones. Later in 2013, Apple iPhone 5S offered its users with an ability to use their fingerprints for multiple phone security purposes. Immediately a month later, HTC launched the One Max with also included fingerprint recognition.

Following the above brands, Samsung released the Galaxy S5 which offered fingerprint sensors on the home button.With the popularity of the biometric sensors among smartphone users- many cheaper brands offered the technology as of December 2015, including $100 UMi Fair. Samsung later added this security authentication services for its mid-range A-series smartphones.

Two years after the launch of Apple iPhone 5S, the brand introduced an even faster Touch ID fingerprint sensor with iPhone 6s.Later in 2016, OPPO Electronics claimed to introduce to the fastest fingerprint recognition to unlock the F1s model in 0.22 seconds.

However, There are so many obstacle for the hacker to access your fingerprint authentication- they’ll have to create multiple templates of “Master Prints” to match and mimic a real human finger. Fingerprint authentication sensor can surely eliminate the risk of forgetting complex passwords or passcodes to enter your mobile phone, as it is something to do with a human body which cannot be lost. At the same time, you should enable all security measures available to keep your data and personal information away from hackers. Additionally, you can always switch over to other authentication smartphone solutions that include PIN code/Passcode, Pattern Lock, Face Lock, Wrapping Up and another security system.