Researchers reportedly discovered a new side-channel attack that can swipe someone's fingerprints from sounds made when a finger swipes across a touchscreen.
Toms Hardware reported that researchers from institutions in China and the United States outlined an innovative attack targeting biometric security in a paper titled "PrintListener: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Authentication via the Finger Friction Sound."
The attack uses the audio characteristics of a finger gliding across a touchscreen to infer attributes of the fingerprint pattern.
Through testing, the scientists claim they can successfully extract "up to 27.9 percent of partial fingerprints and 9.3 percent of complete fingerprints within five tries at the highest security false acceptance rate setting of 0.01 percent," according to the report.
"Finger-swiping friction sounds can be captured by attackers online with a high possibility," the researchers claim.
The sounds come from the use of popular apps like Discord, Skype, WeChat, FaceTime, and others, Toms Hardware reported.
According to the researchers, PrintListener underwent extensive real-world experiments — and can reportedly enable successful partial fingerprint attacks in over one in four cases and complete fingerprint attacks in approximately one in 10 cases.
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