Recreating your fingerprint from the sounds on your screen!
Okay, so this is a wild one! Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen! đ€Ż
How on earth is this possible I hear you ask?!
Joint research from Chinese and American researchers found that sound characteristics of a userâs finger swiping on a touchscreen could be extracted to recreate fingerprint pattern features. It wasnât a super precise attack with the findings that only 9.3% of a complete fingerprint could be established and 27.9% of a partial fingerprint. However this is still noteworthy when we consider how many of our essential services and devices are secured with a fingerprint. Our banking apps, the lock screen for our mobile phone, authentication apps â all the items we wish to keep secure and were sure that they would be unless someone was able to dust off a wine glass weâd used or gain ownership of a digit.
But now it seems that they can listen in to our finger swiping actions and use these friction sounds to, at least partially, recreate our fingerprints. Pairing this with a high resolution photo of a hand could also lead to a higher match percentage.
The research paper proposes PrintListener, a model which can collect the friction sounds needed from a standard device microphone and doesnât even require an extensive data set for the person whose fingerprint is being recreated. Thereâs some impressive algorithms happening behind the scenes but the research shows that such an attack is not only theoretical but feasible and effective with existing technology.
Whilst this is unlikely to be a common tactic that cyber criminals are using today, itâs worth getting ahead and protecting yourself from this sci-fi-esque side channel attack:
đïžAvoid showing your palm with fingerprints in public photos, on social media etc
đ§Avoid screen swiping/use when on a public discord voice channel, webinar, or other audio recordings available to the general public
đ±Where possible use apps with automatic speech noise reduction as this will decrease the friction sounds made from screen use
đȘUse a screen protector on your phone to add an extra layer of complexity to the friction patten (matte ones are especially good as they donât retain fingerprint marks)
You can read the full paper here: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-618-paper.pdf
