The Galaxy S10's face to unlock, deceived by images, brothers and sisters

Here's another friendly reminder that if your Android phone does not have special hardware for unlocking the face, the feature is probably not very secure. The latest phone to implement face unlocking with the normal front camera is the Galaxy S10, and web users report that the feature is easily lost or confused.

There are a number of reports that say – surprise! -A 2D image sensor can be deceived by a 2D image. The Verge was able to unlock the device with a video and the Unbox Therapy YouTube channel was able to unlock the S10 simply by reading one of the videos from its public channel at the camera's view. The worst example is probably AndroidWorld.it, which could unlock the Galaxy S10 by waving a photo in front of the device.

The Galaxy S10 may also have trouble distinguishing different people. Security Researcher Jane Wong was able to unlock his brother's phone with his face.

Samsung previously had a more secure face unlocking system, which was not based on a single camera. Starting from the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung has introduced additional hardware for unlocking the face, which uses an infrared LED and an additional front camera to scan your iris. This material lasted until the Galaxy S8, Note 8, S9 and Note 9, but was removed from the Galaxy S10. Presumably, Samsung just did not have room for the extra hardware at the front of this generation's phone. The Galaxy S10 uses ultra thin glasses that can not even accommodate a camera. Instead, the camera is placed under the screen and the pixels that are in the lens shift are simply cut off from the screen. More front-end sensors would have resulted in more display holes, so Samsung has cut additional hardware.

This problem is identical to the one that Samsung had years ago with the Galaxy S8, which could use a camera-based face unlock instead of the iris scanner. Once again, he was duped with a picture. At the time, you could just ignore the feature and use the iris unlock, but on the Galaxy S10, face unlocking by camera is the only biometric option in addition to the fingerprint reader digital on the screen. Fooling a camera-based face unlock with a photo was something on Android that dates back to 2011, but for some reason, smartphone companies continue to use this feature.