When Apple announced the iPhone X last month—its all-screen, home-button-less, unlock-with-a-look flagship—it placed an enormous bet on facial recognition as the future of authentication. For hackers around the world, Face ID practically painted a glowing target on the phone: How hard could it be, after all, to reproduce a person's face—which sits out in public for everyone to see—and use it to bypass the device's nearly unbreakable encryption without leaving a trace?

Pretty damn hard, it turns out. A month ago, almost immediately after Apple announced Face ID, WIRED began scheming to spoof Apple's facial recognition system. We'd eventually enlist an experienced biometric hacker, a Hollywood face-caster and makeup artist, and our lead gadget reviewer David Pierce to serve as our would-be victim. We ultimately spent thousands of dollars on every material we could imagine to replicate Pierce's face, down to every dimple and eyebrow hair.

For any reader with face-hacking ambitions, let us now save you some time and cash: We failed. Did we come close to cracking Face ID? We don't know. Face ID offers no hints or scores when it reads a face, only a silently unlocked padlock icon or a merciless buzz of rejection. All we learned from our rather expensive experiment is that Face ID is, at the very least, far from trivial to spoof.

Someone will no doubt successfully crack the system sooner or later—we haven't given up yet ourselves—just as hackers broke Apple's Touch ID fingerprint reader within days of the release of the iPhone 5. But Apple has successfully crafted an unlocking mechanism that's mostly effortless for a phone's owner and yet, for the moment, beyond our efforts to defeat it.

"Apple has really thought about the obvious attack scenarios," says Marc Rogers, a well-known hacker and researcher for the web security firm Cloudflare, whom WIRED enlisted to help with the Face ID cracking. Rogers gained distinction in the field as one of the first hackers to break Touch ID in 2013. "It's clear they tested against a range of materials, and built a model that’s robust enough to resist some pretty convincing attacks."

Not Just Another Pretty Face Recognition System

Apple's iPhone X keynote, earlier leaked materials, and patent filings Rogers dug up all indicated that the phone would do far more than just a two-dimensional face check. Simpler, flat-image scans had allowed earlier laptops and phones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 to be fooled by a mere photograph. Instead, the iPhone X projects a grid of 30,000 infrared dots onto a face, and then uses an infrared camera to read the distortion of that grid, creating a three-dimensional model.