It’s a common complaint of modern
smartphones that they’re “fingerprint
magnets”. Well the iPhone 5s, released
this morning, is already turning out to be
the greatest fingerprint magnet of all
time.
Or, at least, the greatest magnet for
fingerprinters of all time.
Its “Touch ID” security system, that lets
you unlock your iPhone 5s by simply
touching your finger to a fingerprint
scanner hidden beneath the Home
button, is already the subject of a hacking
bounty.
Anyone who can crack the system, by
lifting a fingerprint “like from a beer mug”
and using that fingerprint to unlock the
phone, stands to earn $US11,712.23, plus
an assortment of other prizes including a
free patent application for their hack.
That’s the bounty set by the website
, which at the
time of writing answered that question
with a resounding No!
The website, started by the security
researcher , has been
gathering pledges from parties interested
in seeing the iPhone 5s hacked, and is
offering those pledges as a prize to
anyone who can make a video proving
they hacked the system.
So far the pledges include $US10,600 in
cash, an iPhone 5c, numerous bottles of
alcohol, some books and some Bitcoins,
which are those computer-generated
tokens you can exchange for goods,
services or cash.
Judging from the mathematical nature of
several of the pledges, the prizes are
being offered, at least in part, by nerds.
There’s a pledge for 0.314159 Bitcoins,
which is Archimedes’ Constant divided by
10, and another pledge for 2.56 Bitcoins,
which is either Blazy’s Constant or 2 to
the power of 8 divided by 100, depending
on what the rest of the digits are (if any).
Also there’s one for 0.42 Bitcoins, which
is 101010 in binary, converted to decimal
and divided by 100. Though that might
just be my imagination.
Whether all the pledgers will cough up
the prizes if and when the time comes,
well, that’s another matter.
The Australian Financial Review
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