Samsung Galaxy S10 fingerprint sensor defeated by a $450 3D printer

Enlarge / A slide from Samsung's Galaxy S10 launch. (credit: Samsung)

This year in the world of smartphone fingerprint sensors, Qualcomm's ultrasonic in-display fingerprint reader, the 3D Sonic Sensor, is expected to get widespread adoption. The first phone with the new sensor, the Samsung Galaxy S10, has been in the wild for about a few weeks now, and users are already figuring out ways to defeat it.

Imgur user "darkshark" presents a pretty convincing way to thwart the sensor: take a picture of a fingerprint off of an object like a wine glass, add some depth to it in 3D editing software, and then print it out on a 3D printer. Specifically, darkshark used the Anycubic Photon 3D printer, a resin stereolithography printer that can be had for under $450. (You could buy two of these for the cost of a Galaxy S10+!) A video in the Imgur post shows the S10 unlocking with the printed finger facsimile, which looks a bit like a glass microscope slide.

Fingerprint sensors work by measuring and storing the ridges and valleys in your finger, and various types have come to mainstream smartphones over the years. The most common is a "capacitive" sensor, which is an opaque, case-mounted sensor that sits on the back of most Android phones. These sensors would measure the electrical capacitance of your fingertip, allowing it to sense the ridges and valleys of your finger by the change in the electrical charge on the pad. Since it's difficult to replicate the electrical qualities of human skin at home, especially with the level of detail in a fingerprint, capacitive fingerprint sensors are the most logistically challenging to crack.

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