As many of you would know, a major feature introduced with Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is face unlock. Through a combination of a front-facing camera (on the Galaxy Nexus) and facial recognition software, you can unlock your phone in around a second using just your face.
There was a report early last month that the new face unlock feature could easily be broken using a photo of the person or a person that looks very similar. I thought it would be poor of Google to allow a new security feature that could so easily be broken, so I decided that I would test out these claims for myself.
You can check out the entire test I did below, simulating a real and possible situation for someone who might steal your phone.
While I did only attempt to use a photo in the above video, I can report that is very easy to unlock the phone using a vlog-style recording of the person. Very, very easy; so be careful.
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