"Chaos Computer Club: iPhone 5S finger-sniffer COMPROMISED"

[denverbill]

14. How many people etch circuit boards?

I'm a programmer and I work with a bunch of other pretty smart programmers and none of us do anything like that. Could I do it? Yeah, probably, if I read up on it and tried it a few times. Could the average phone thief? Not very likely.

And how likely is it that the first time a hacker tries this process it will succeed? CCC has obviously been working on this process off and on for years so they have practice lifting prints, etc.

The thing about the fingerprints is a phone would be covered in prints, from 10 different fingers or more (if a person is showing pictures to other people, etc). Most of the prints will overlap, get smudged, get wiped off sliding in and out of pockets, etc. A thief would have to be handling the phone with a tool to avoid smudging the prints even more. I think the likelihood that he could find one good complete print of the finger he needed would be rather low. And the chances of extracting the print correctly the first time without messing it (and other prints) up wouldn't be too good unless they had practiced the technique.

I seriously think that if you handed me your new iPhone with one and only one perfect fingerprint and told me it was mine free if I could crack it, chances are very low I could do it without help. And even if I could it would take me days if not weeks to do it.