Here's how easy it is to get past an iPhone's fingerprint sensor

An experiment with fingerprint sensor company Vkansee demonstrated how Play-Doh can be used to unlock the iPhone

Monday 29 February 2016 16:01 GMT

The iPhone fingerprint sensor may seem secure, but it's actually pretty easy to get past (Getty)

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The fingerprint sensor in your iPhone may seem like a secure way to keep your files safe, but it's actually pretty easy to get past it.

Business Insider met with fingerprint sensor company Vkansee at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to find out how to get past an iPhone's fingerprint sensor.

Vkansee produces tiny optical fingerprint sensors that it says capture more detail than the sensors in an iPhone.

To prove how different a Vkansee sensor is to an iPhone one, we tried an experiment to see whether Play-Doh could unlock my iPhone.

Here's what happened:

You start things off by squeezing the dental mould out of a tube. It comes out like putty.

Business Insider/James Cook (Business Insider/James Cook)

I rested my finger on the dental mould for just over five minutes.

And then I slowly lifted it off. I couldn't just pull it straight up otherwise it could have ripped the putty.

Sure enough, my fingerprint was left on the dental mould. We left it to dry for a few minutes under a fan.

The next stage of the hack was sticking some Play-Doh onto the mould. A few minutes later it was all done — and it unlocked my phone!

Here are two of Vkansee's fingerprint sensors which they say capture more detail than the ones in your phone.

Here's what the kind of fingerprint sensor inside your phone looks like.

Here's a normal optical fingerprint sensor — it's pretty big. Vkansee says its sensors are smaller because of pinhole photography.

Here's my fingerprint as a computer sees it.

And here's what the Play-Doh version looks like. This was enough to fool the sensor in my iPhone.

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