Fingerprint sensor is the trend nowadays on smart phones. To enhance security on their devices and prevent data leaking, many manufacturers integrate this sensor on their products. Moreover, having a fingerprint sensor is an appealing feature that gets a smart phone more attention as well. However, is a fingerprint sensor as good as it may seem?

Fingerprint sensor on Samsung Galaxy S6

According to the Black Hat security conference on going nowadays, fingerprint sensors on Android devices are not as secure as that on Apple iPhone series. It gets easily hacked, and that seems to be a problem if you store a lot of data on your Android phone. Hackers would get through this wall of security, and take your money in just a second.

The professionals in this area have checked and tested a lot of fingerprint sensors on many old and new Android phones. They all agree that there are so many bugs and flaws that hackers can focus on. They even list out some possible attacks hackers could use, and that would be something to worry about. Security researchers Tao Wei and Zhang Wulong even describe how hackers could gather data from high end smart phones such as HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S5. It seems Android needs more and more feature to ensure security, since it is such an open OS.

Sony Xperia Z5 and Z5 compact are said to have fingerprint sensor as well

On the other, Touch ID on Apple products is said to be immune from those kinds of attack. Since Apple products won’t give you any data if you cannot provide the exact crypto key, it seems iPhone series are more reliable than Android?

Touch ID seems more secured than any other Android fingerprint sensor

Some light for the news though: Samsung and Google will update security each month, so if you’re using an updated version of Android, you will be safe. Since the patched versions are updated, you should be fine with your data.