GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2017-0056

Security Firm Bypasses Apple Face ID with Crafted Mask

Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptAdversarial evasion

Security researchers successfully bypassed Apple Face ID authentication using an engineered physical mask. Apple patched or evaluated the biometric security following the demonstration.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Adversarial evasion
    Inputs crafted to make a model misclassify or miss detections (perturbations, evasion of AI-based defences).
owasp llm top 10
no entry for these categories
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
1 · Research / proof of concept
Demonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
targets
Apple
products
Face ID
incident date
13 Sep 2017
first reported
13 Sep 2017
origin
AI Incident Database
Derived from the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0).
classifier confidence
0.85 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
face-id · biometric-bypass · adversarial-evasion
record
created 2026-10-18 06:33Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:59Z · json

Sources · 1

  1. 2017-09-13
    Hackers Break Apple Face ID
    AI Incident Database · incidentdatabase.ai/cite/26

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