SAN FRANCISCO – One security researcher has proven how Snapchat’s new verification system can be hacked, just days after its Captcha-style image verification debuted.
Steve Hickson used his knowledge of how computers recognize images and template matching to show how a computer could fool the new security tool, CNET News.Com reported.
“I spent around 30 minutes writing up some code” to perform the automated recognition and selection task, Hickson said. “With very little effort, my code was able to ‘find the ghost’ in the above example with 100 percent accuracy.”
He explained that after “thresholding” them, which separates an image into color segments, he created feature points on the original ghost template and had his script look for matches in the extracted images.
“If the uniqueness is high enough and enough features are found, we call it a ghost,” he said.
When it comes to security, Snapchat has had a rough time of late. The company’s user database was hacked, exposing the usernames and phone numbers of 4.6 million users, and a 16-year-old texted Snapchat Chief Technology Officer Bobby Murphy’s phone to prove that the system was still insecure.
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