How to unlock the infrared camera hidden inside the Pixel 4 By Steve Mould

There is look, this is a Google Pixel 4, and it has faced unlock, so you can unlock it with your face or should I say I can unlock it with my face. If you can unlock it with your face, we defeat the object with it, and it's the good kind of face unlock, which is to say it extracts, 3d information about my face, like you can't trick it with just a picture of my face or a video of my face, and it achieves this by shining infrared dots on my face and then there's an infrared camera that picks up the information about those dots and in that sense, it's very similar to the way face. Unlock works on the iPhone, but the big difference is iPhone is quite a lockdown platform, whereas Android is quite an open platform. So if you install the right kind of alternative camera app, for example, open camera, which is an open source, camera app, you can switch to the infrared camera, and this isn't meant for human consumption. This is meant to be consumed by the software. That does the facial recognition, and yet here I am looking at an infrared version of me.

How cool is that I carry around in my pocket an infrared camera- and this is passable like this- is useful, like if you're interested in playing around with you know what are things look like in infrared then, and you've got a pixel for then you can. You can do this. There are other Android phones that have 3d face, unlock I, think at least one other one. So try installing open camera on your Android with face, unlock and see what you get. But this is amazing for ISO, it's really cool.

You can have it look some strange things in infrared, that's my LED panel, that is on at the moment, but you can't see that it's on, because it's not emitting any infrared light. Are there interesting things so prints? Looks weird in infrared light, this is ammonia. This is the Mona Lisa and that you can tell it's not the real Mona Lisa, because in infrared light, there 's's no there's no light car, it's just blank in infrared. This is near-infrared by the, so we're talking about like the wavelengths of light that are just too beyond what we can see, as opposed to far infrared, which you would use for thermal imaging and stuff. Like that.

The other way you can tell this isn't the real Mona Lisa is that it's too big, and also I have it. This is my electric hob, you might call it a burner or something, and it looks like it's opaque, but it needs to be transparent to infrared, because that's how it heats stuff, it probably only needs to be transparent to far infrared, but you can see in this pixel for infrared camera that it's transparent to near-infrared as well. Look. This is what's under the controls, and you can see the cables and stuff when you turn it on. You can really see the brightness of it.

This is what red wine looks like in the near-infrared I learned this one from Andrew Steele's video called invisible London, it's perfect linking the card and the description by playing around you can get a sense of how face unlock works like if I put my finger here. I'm sort of casting a shadow on my face and if I bring it all the way over to that corner of the phone I'm blacking out my face completely. So the infrared torch is in that corner of the phone and, if I put my finger over this corner of the phone I'm covering up the infrared camera itself, so the infrared torch near for a camera are on opposite sides of the phone, and that makes sense actually, because if the torch and the camera were in the same place, you wouldn't get as much where you wouldn't get any 3d information if they were exactly on top of each other, because you would just get a uniform grid of dots, no matter how I move my face around so by separating the two out, you can extract this 3d information in less separated as far as possible, then on opposite sides of the phone. So I've done a bit more research, and it turns out. There are actually two infrared cameras in this phone there's the one that we can see through the open camera software on this side.

There's another one on this side, which is right next to that infrared, Dot, projector, and so the one that's over here will receive a fairly regular array of dots and the one over here will receive a distorted array of dots because it's far away from the dot projector and that makes sense like the software, can compare the two images and see how the dots are moved relative to each other to extract that 3d information in the same way that animals with a stereoscopic vision, see things like I talked about in my previous video, actually I'm. Just talking about how many jokes and there's a separate infrared, illuminator, so I guess that's another layer of facial recognition. That's going on in the same way that you could do facial recognition with just a photo. I wanted to show you what the phone does when it uses your face to unlock itself, but I can't record infrared and use face unlock at the same time. But it's okay, because I have a second pixel phone here.

This is my wife's pixel phone. She used to have iPhone things are a lot better now. Actually, one way in which things aren't better is that we now use the same charging cables so ever often can't find my judging cables. So anyway, I've set up Leanne's phone to unlock with my face, which is obviously a bit annoying for her, but just for testing purposes. So I'll cover up the infrared illuminator and the top director on my phone, and I'll bring up my wife's phone.

There is look, so the data coming from that infrared camera, which was designed to be consumed by a machine, is consumable by our human eyes and that's really fun like there's no security concern here, but that's not always the case. In fact, many hacking stories begin with a similar scenario. To this. For example, last year a big Indian company called Just Dial, were found to have an API, so API's are ways the different bits of software communicate with each other and extract data from each other. And it's you know it's not.

It's not formatted to be nice and human-readable, it's formatted to be machine-readable, except that this API was available to anyone on the internet and anyone with sufficient skill to be able to query the API could extract data from it because there was enough security in place. This particular security vulnerability exposed the user data of over a hundred million users. The point is good. Software is hard to make, and good secure software is even harder. You should never assume that the data you put online is secure.

So how do we protect ourselves? Well, one thing: that's really important to do is use different passwords for all the services that you use so that, for example, if one of the services you use gets compromised and the passwords are stolen, hackers can't use those passwords to get into your other accounts, and so you need unique passwords on all your accounts, and they all need to be strong. So how do you do that? How do you remember tens of strong, unique passwords? Well, the answer, is you? Don't you use a password manager like the sponsor of this video ? Lane I've been advocating for the use of password managers for ages? All my family are using password managers, and I'm telling you that you should -. Maybe you got a new device over Christmas as well and if did I recommend one of the first apps you install is a password manager. In fact, dash lane will sync your passwords between your phone and your computer. So all the passwords you need are in all the places that you need them and in fact, because they're sponsoring this video, you can get your first device, absolutely free, whether it's your phone or your computer, by going to dash lane com forward, slash Steve, and if you like it- and you want to upgrade to premium, you can get 10% off using the promo code Steve when you check out I, hope you enjoyed this video.

If you did don't forget to hit subscribe, and I'll, see you next time.

Source : Steve Mould