This guy ‘accidentally’ figured out how to unlock Android without a password

The vast majority of us use passwords on mobile devices as a way to ensure security. But what if someone tells you that it is possible to unlock your cell phone? android without password? This is what the security researcher found Cybernetics David Schutz, but claims that the discovery of the “flaw” was entirely accidental.

Read more: Google and Android launch a password manager

How did David discover the bug?

According to the personal account, David needed to recover the SIM card of his blocked cell phone, because he tried three times to put the PIN on the lock screen. To do the recovery, he had to resort to a PUK (Personal Unlocking Key) code. Then he needed to enter a new cell phone PIN.

At that time, David noticed that he did not need to enter the PIN when registering the new password, only the fingerprint verification. This was indeed a major drawback, as phones rarely ask for the fingerprint without verifying the passcode first. So David decided to try to restart the process to exploit the flaw further.

Therefore, he decided to reproduce the glitch without unlocking the phone and in this way it was possible to bypass the fingerprint prompt as well. Soon after, David reported the failure to Google, which has not yet fixed the system, although it assumed that there had already been a failure.

How does this flaw affect mobile phones

More and more people are thinking about how to keep our phones safe, because they contain a lot of important personal information. Thus, this glitch shows that there are still ways to circumvent security systems and most of them we probably don’t even know about. Incidentally, this was not the first report of similar failures.

Firsthand, the flaw discovered by David Schutz affects all Android devices with versions 10, 11, 12 and 13. Until then, Google is very strict about security policies, but it will be necessary to wait a little longer until then it appears New Android version with this bug corrected.