Testing Apple's Touch ID with Fake Fingerprints

Hey it's Norm from tested and
I am here with:

Frank Bullito

We're here at Adam's shop
for another video

Interesting video this time, it's
an experiment.

yeah
An honest to goodness experiment.

We have no idea how this is going to end.

So today we're going to talk about technology.
Are you comfortable?

ok..
Special effects and technology

Last year apple released the iPhone 5-S,

which was their first product
using 'Touch I.D.'

You've probably heard of Touch I.D.,
it's a bio-metric sensor system

for your phone, to double as
your password.

Now this year there are more products
using Touch I.D.

and more services using them,

it's being used for things like Apple-pay,
passwords, one password

And we wanted to see, basically
how fool-proof it was.

We're not going to hack Touch I.D
people have made claims about hacking it

Last year a hacking group over
in Germany

named 'Chaos Computer Club' released
a video

showing how they 'spoofed'
Touch I.D

and what they did was they duplicated
someone's fingerprint

and put it on acetate and created a
relief image,

and it was a pretty involved process.

But we wanted to-
We wanted to make it more involved

Even more involved, but basically try
to understand how Touch I.D works.

Um, do you know how this works?

Why don't you explain.
(laughs)

So beneath this home button
on the iPhone and the new iPads

is a sensor, basically an optical sensor,
almost like a camera.

There is a capacitance sensor,
which makes the touch screen work,

so it knows, it registers
that your finger is there.

But basically it takes a high resolution image,
people have said it's about 500 dpi.

Which is fairly high, Apple talks about
sub-dermal imaging, but basically,

it knows all the grooves and all
the curves of your fingerprint

and registers that, uh because you do
need to register it multiple times,

stores it locally, so when you put your finger
on there it recognises that it is your fingerprint.

So we wanted to see if we could activate,
unlock a phone, activate Touch I.D

without having the actual hand there;
a warm bodied hand,

maybe a.. dismembered hand.
There you go. (laughs)

So this is actually a hand-cast we did
a couple of months ago, of my hand

It's just a silicone hand-cast and
based on your experience in the

special effects industry Frank,
how accurate is the fingerprints

on something like a hand-cast?

Well, I mean, the silicone doesn't
shrink or expand or anything,

so it's pretty accurate, as long
as we got in all the detail

This was done in an alginate mold,
so the detail might be a little soft

but what we'll do today is we'll do a
little silicone cast of your finger

..or my finger and we'll see if
we can crack it with that.

So we're talking about mold materials
and casting materials

and we're using silicone as a mold material
and in doing it right-

You're going to get a more accurate casting.

Hopefully it will be almost exactly 1-to-1,
y'know.. microns of accuracy.

Hopefully.
Hopefully.

And then the casting material, also important.
yeah

'cause you have resins and silicones
and all sorts of stuff.

Well the pad of your fingertip is about
a 35-A durometer, but-

When you say Durometer that's how
stiff it is, how rigid it is

Yeah, the Durometer scale is how
you measure how soft

or how rigid something is.
There's an 'A' scale for soft things,

and a 'D' scale for rigid things.

And your thumb-tip is about a 35-A.
ok

But, the problem is is that when
we push on a button

it doesn't have enough give to
kinda like.. flatten out,

so I think we want to go a
little bit softer.

So we were doing this off-camera,
this casting is done in

a 20 durometer silicone, which technically
is softer than the 35 of your finger.

I think we want to go softer than that,
I have a 10 Durometer.

That's right, you want it to be able
to flatten without pushing the button.

Yeah.

Now the other piece of
the puzzle is capacitance.

You need to be able to activate that
touch sensor in the first place.

How are we going to give silicone capacitance?
Because if you put a silicone finger,

or you know, a hot-dog on here,
it's not going to activate the touch-screen.

Maybe a hot-dog will... would a-
A hot-dog would, yes.

But a silicone hot-dog wouldn't.
We can make hot-dog fingers.

uh.. we could do that.

I think, from what everybody's told me,
adding graphite is enough to

give it capacitance. So that's mixing it into
the silicone or powdering

the surface of the mold, and then
putting the silicone behind it

so that the silicone grabs the
surface of the graphite.

We'll try it.
We'll try it.

Like I said, this is an honest-to-goodness
experiment and-

And there's a good likelihood we'll fail.
(laughs)

But follow along the process,
let's go to step one

which is creating a casting of
your finger.

If you're using 'body double' from 'Smooth-on,'
which is just a casting silicone,

Specifically for life casting.
For life casting, it's accurate as possible,

we've done life-casts with it before,
you mix in a little bit of material as well?

I mix in a thickener called '5X,' instead
of using Cabosil or something fumey

to thicken it, it's just a couple drops
of this liquid and it gets thick.

And then you're, in terms of making the mold,
you're just doing a thin coating

of silicone, just to get into those grooves
and make sure it's a strong relief,

a perfect copy, and then just
slather that silicone on top.

Yeah. I kinda smeared it into
the grooves of my fingertip.

And then built it up so that
it has some thickness.

Alright, so now it's time to
wait until this cures.

Ok Frank, while the silicone mold
on your finger is curing,

Let's begin experiment 2.

Another way we thought we could
'spoof' Touch I.D. is

if someone left their fingerprint on
a piece of glass for example,

and we'd captured it photographically.
So we had you put you finger right here

on some baby powder and put it
right on this piece of foam-core.

This is basically the equivalent of putting
your greasy finger on glass, for example.

Which is what the 'C.C.C.' did.
So, we took a photo of this,

took a macro photo, blew it up,
very high resolution

with my camera and then
processed it on a computer

to scale it, to be exactly the size
of your finger.

Measured it, it was about an inch tall.
And then I laser etched it.

So I tried several variations, laser
etched of different relief.

With laser etching y'know-
Different depths.

Yeah. Different depths, changed the colour,
inverted it, uhh but basically

used this as a substitute for your finger
and then mold on top of that,

or cast on top of that. We're not sure
if that's going to work either,

but we also want to create
the molds here.

And also using silicone.
Sure.

I ran some 'Body Double' onto
these etched parts,

to see how they come out and some of them
look like they're actually going to work.

So what we want to do is
we want to dust them with graphite.

And then, put some more silicone
on top of this, and then

we can use it as kind-of
a finger pad,

You know, because it's thin and flexible
and maybe that.. that will work.

So we're going to do some mental
gymnastics here,

the photo of your fingerprint, which
I blew up and high-contrasted,

made sure that all the curves
were very visible.

That was the reverse of
what your fingerprint actually is.

So without inverting it, without flipping
it back, just etching that,

basically, what you're going to get
on the etch is what you would get

on the foam-core here or a
fingerprint on the phone.

And so when we create the silicone
casting on top of that,

this isn't the mold, this is the fingerprint.
Yes.

Ok. So put some graphite on there
and we'll mix up some more 'Body Double'

And we'll add a little graphite
into the 'Body Double'

Just to help with capacitance maybe, I dunno.

It's black like tar!

So the cast of your finger is about done.
Yeah, this is all solid now so..

What you do is just kind of
peel it off.

Because it's in all the detail of my
finger it's got a lot of suction.

That's good.
Yeah.

Take a look at that, you can flip it inside-out
and see all those ridges and grooves,

There you go Internet, copy this
and go hack all my passwords.

That's a good looking fingerprint.

So what we'll do is put a few
different materials into this.

But, we have another copy of the fingerprint
etched at a different DPI

and we'll smear some more stuff into that.
Yeah.

My question and my concern with the
laser etching is the resolution you can etch.

And you can change that on the laser cutter,
so I have 500ppi, 600ppi and 800ppi.

ppi or dpi?
It's.. sort of the same, points per inch.

ok.

And the higher we go the more chance
that the acrylic will get fused into the crevices

and the dust will take away some of the detail,
but that- you can recognise it as a fingerprint

I just don't know if it will be
good enough to fool Touch I.D.

You don't know if we're good enough to fool Touch I.D?

Are we smarter than Apple?
Probably not.

Alright, back to experiment 1,
the hand-cast - the finger cast

and you're going to put some silicone in there.
Yeah.

So first thing I'm going to do is
hit it with a little bit of release

This is just 'Ease-release 200.'

We actually haven't seen you use
mold remover before,

this extends the life of your molds.

Yeah, if you want to cast like Urethane
parts or something like that

this works great, it just happens
to be what I have sitting around right now.

I want to put release on here because
nothing sticks to silicone but other silicone,

but we're putting silicone in here so..
Oh..

So I'm spraying it in and just
sort of rubbing it around

So what I'm going to do on this first
is I'll rub some graphite into the surface

kind of like how I dusted the etching.

You've gotta be careful, this is really tricky
because we want just enough graphite

to activate Touch I.D, and the activation
I think happens around the ring of the home button

But we don't want too much graphite, because
that might take away the detail.

I want to Imagine Apple engineers watching
this and just laughing their butts off.

'Those fools, those morons,
they'll never do it.'

So this is the rubber I'm going to use,
the 10 Durometer,

for this stuff we were using the 'Body Double'
because it was real thin and

it'll just serve as a pad you
put on your finger.

So this one- I'll make kind of a full finger,
sort of like this stuff.

And I'll do another one that's just
kind of a pad we can put on another finger.

Alright, so the castings are done.
The silicone has cured,

It's time to pop 'em out of the molds.
Yep.

So what we have here,
we actually did more than 1.

A silicone casting from a silicone mold,
pops out and how do the fingerprints look?

I think that the detail is really great, it's
about as exact of a replica of a fingerprint

as you can get from your fingerprint, but
we'll see if it reads on the Touch I.D.

And then also the silicone we used on top
of the laser etching,

we pulled those out as well. And the
advantage of these is that

if someone wanted to 'spoof' someone elses
fingerprint, this is more likely

how they would be able to do it. They're not
going to be able to get someone to

put their finger in a mold for
15-20 minutes.

They're more likely to take a photo
of their fingerprint,

from a touchpad or piece of glass
or something,

and see if they can laser etch it.
Yeah.

Plus these are thinner.
Yeah, that'll help with the capacitance.

It's like if you're wearing a rubber glove
you can still activate your phone.

So let's do a first test which is
a test of capacitance.

Let's unlock this phone,
I'll just type in the passcode..

And show that using the graphite infused
silicone works, just to manipulate the touch screen.

Alright, that seems to be working.

Let's try with this now, this is Franks finger.
Oh, no capacitance.

Umm.. we could try wetting it or..-
Putting some graphite on top of it.

Yeah we could try those two things.

This is tough because water
just beads off silicone.

Ok, a wet finger,
a wet finger-casting.

That activates the screen.
Mm-hmm.

But we don't know how that
will affect Touch I.D.

So this one's dusted with extra graphite.
We'll see if that works.

It does!
Great.

So capacitance is working, so here
comes the moment of truth.

Or failure.
Or failure.

(laughs)

The moment of failure,
potential failure. We'll call it that.

I'll hit the top button on the screen,
it's going to want to unlock.

And we'll show that, for example,
my finger doesn't unlock this.

Your finger does unlock.
My finger that was molded does unlock.

And now let's put that on top of there.
(gasp)

It unlocked!
It unlocked!

Holy moly!
We fuckin' did it!

I'm genuinely shocked, I didn't
think it was going to work.

Let's see if we can duplicate that.
Alright..

Let's do- let's prove that this
finger here does not work.

Try again
Does not work, ok.

(gasp!)
We did it.

(laughs)
Huge success.

Test 1, experiment 1;
Success.

I'm going to try it on my finger.

So let's talk about what did work.
Ok.

Experiment 1: we did a silicone casting of your
finger, with a silicone mold

that you carefully made, also of
the same index finger.

Now with the silicone casting we infused
it with graphite, which by itself

didn't seem to activate the capacitance ring
on the Touch I.D sensor.

But by brushing graphite on top of it,
that actually made it register as a finger.

And, with one of our castings we were
able to unlock the phone.

And the cooler thing even, is that on new
iPhones 6 and 6+, is theoretically

more improved, the sensor on the
inside is higher resolution.

And even on the 6+, where we trained beforehand,
your index finger but not mine...

It unlocks!

So now I can unlock
Will's phone any time I want.

Well.. if your fingerprint was stored in it, yes.
(laughs)

But the other thing we have to test of course
is the laser etching process.

This is taking a high resolution photograph
left on a surface, laser etching it

and then creating a
mold of that.

So we've cut out a bunch of our
laser etched fingers,

Let's go back to the 5-S, ok,
and let's see if that works.

So here I have your fingerprint
theoretically, on top of mine..

..'try again.'

Come on!..... do something!..

So unfortunately, the laser etched and then
cast silicone fingerprint doesn't work.

What's interesting is that it does recognise
on the Touch I.D, it is trying a fingerprint.

Which, if you put any other capacitive surface on there-
Like a hot-dog.

Right. It knows that that's not a finger,
so it wouldn't even try.

So we got it to try, we got it to fail,
but we couldn't get it to

recognise it as your finger.
Well..

At least we got one of them.
At least we got one of them.

This is really cool, we get to learn basically
how Touch I.D. works in practice.

We recognise it doesn't need a warm finger.
Mmhmm.

All you need is something that has
the fidelity, the resolution of your fingertip

and has enough capacitance to activate the ring.
Yeah.

So if your finger was chopped off,
theoretically, it would still work.

There you go.
There you go.

Touch I.D. tested, it's a fun project
with Frank Bellino

What else do you do? You do
a bunch of other tests here or-

Well, during the week, when I was at lunch
and stuff like that, I tried a bunch

of different things. One thing I did was
take a ball of clay and just push

my finger into it, to get a fingerprint in the clay,
and put silicone into there.

That didn't work either, these are attempts at
just doing a fingerprint in clay.

That's not enough resolution, the silicone
mold gets a better resolution.

So that's kind of the way to do that.

Try different ways and you know what?
If you have experience with special effects

or casting.. or new ideas.. the Choas
Compter Club, they posted their instructions

we'd love to see your videos or your attempts
at 'spoofing' Touch I.D.

But this was a lot of fun!
Yeah it was cool

I've never- I've always thought about this but
never really tried it, but now we kind of know

sort of what works.
It's a fun experiment.

Touch I.D tested here on Tested.
Thank you Franky Belito,

Thank you to premium members for
bringing this video

And thanks 'Smooth on' for giving
us stuff to fool with.

Thanks 'Smooth on' for materials again, we used
'Body Double,' we used 'Dragon skin,'

and they have a lot of materials. It's fun stuff
and you'll find more of this stuff on Tested,

Subscribe to our Youtube channel
and we'll see you next time. bye.