GeekPwn 2016 | Hacker demonstrates unlocking Huawei phone with nose tip

Today, at the GeekPwn hacking competition held in Shanghai, hacker Nick from the US Shellphish team successfully hacked into a brand new Huawei P9 Lite phone.

On the stage, Nick called two girls as assistants. The attack was divided into two steps:

1. Let a girl input fingerprints step by step and pretend to be the owner of the phone;

2. He guided another girl step by step to download the attack tool from the predetermined address, and then lightly touched the phone with the tip of her nose, and the phone was instantly opened.

The whole process was extremely fast. Before the audience even understood what was happening, all the permissions of the phone had been obtained by the hacker.

This attack means that if a hacker has the opportunity to install his app on your phone, he can unlock the phone anytime and anywhere and check your little secrets.

According to GeekPwn founder Wang Qi's on-site introduction, this attack looks simple, but in fact it uses as many as eight vulnerabilities, which can be described as "black to the end."

However, for security reasons, the hacker did not intend to reveal the specific principles of his attack on the spot. However, the judges on the spot revealed that the basic attack path starts from the App, obtains root permissions, and then enters the core area of ​​fingerprint storage: TrustZone.

According to GeekPwn official news, any device using the HUAWEI TrustZone service will be affected by this attack, including the previous generation Huawei P8 Lite.

This is the world's first demonstration of breaking through the fingerprint unlocking of a mobile phone. Before this, many security researchers believed that our fingerprints and other secrets were safe with strong hardware encryption. However, hacker attacks tell us not to be so optimistic. Even if the security of the protection system is strong, we should not trust it unconditionally.

Since this attack requires the hacker to have physical contact with the unlocked phone, that is, the hacker must first ask you to help unlock the phone before continuing the attack. Obviously, such an attack condition is still relatively strict.

As for how to prevent Nick from unlocking your phone with his nose or any other part of his body, Leifeng.com's (public account: Leifeng.com) home channel suggests:

1. Don’t let your phone out of your sight;

2. Try not to make friends with hackers.

Follow-up:

After the vulnerabilities discovered during the on-site demonstration were breached, Huawei immediately conducted careful analysis and repair work on the vulnerabilities provided by the organizer to ensure that the security of Huawei's mobile phone system is further improved.

Huawei said:

Any smartphone has certain unknown security vulnerabilities, and the hacking demonstration can urge us to continuously discover product vulnerabilities, continuously test the reliability of the system, and continuously improve the system to keep the product in a relatively safe state and prevent user interests from being violated by malicious persons.

Security is no small matter. Huawei has always attached great importance to the system security of its products. Huawei phones undergo very strict software and hardware quality inspections before leaving the factory, and provide users with relatively comprehensive security protection applications after sales. For Huawei phones, which attach great importance to user security, the security geeks' hacking demonstration is undoubtedly an important opportunity to improve product security.