The vast majority of us use passwords on mobile devices as a way to ensure security. But what if someone told you that it is possible to unlock your cell phone? android without the password? That's what the security researcher found cybernetics David Schutz, but he claims the discovery of the 'flaw' was entirely accidental.
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How David discovered the flaw
According to the personal account, David needed to recover the SIM card of his cell phone that was blocked, because he tried three times to put the PIN on the lock screen. To do the recovery, he had to resort to the PUK (Personal Unblocking Key) code. Then he needed to enter a new PIN code for the cell phone.
It was then that David noticed that he didn't need to enter the PIN when registering the new password, just a fingerprint verification. This was already a big flaw, as phones rarely ask for a fingerprint without first having a passcode verification. So David decided to try to redo the process to further exploit the flaw.
For that, he decided to reproduce the glitch without the phone being unlocked and that way it was possible to bypass the fingerprint prompt as well. Soon after, David reported the flaw to Google, which so far has not corrected the system, although he assumed that there was indeed a flaw.
How this glitch affects cell phones
More and more people are thinking about how to keep our phones safe, as they contain a lot of important personal information. Thus, this failure demonstrates that there are still ways to circumvent security systems and we probably don't even know most of them. Incidentally, this was not the first report of similar failures.
Straightforward, the flaw that David Schutz discovered impacts all Android devices running versions 10, 11, 12, and 13. So far, Google has been very strict with regard to security policies, but it will take a little longer until a new Android version comes out with the correction of this error.
