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Can the iPhone Popularize Fingerprint Readers?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple's iPhone 5S features a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button. Of course, fingerprint-scanning technology isn't new: Bloomberg Terminals feature a built-in fingerprint reader to authenticate users, for example, and various manufacturers have experimented with laptops and smartphones that require a thumb to login. But the technology has thus far failed to become ubiquitous in the consumer realm, and it remains to be seen whether the new iPhone — which is all but guaranteed to sell millions of units — can popularize something that consumers don't seem to want. Security experts seem to be adopting a wait-and-see attitude with regard to Apple's newest trick. 'I'd caution right away, let's see how it tests and what people come up with to break it,' Brent Kennedy, an analyst with the U.S. Computer Emergency and Readiness Team, told Forbes. 'I wouldn't rely on it solely, just as I wouldn't with any new technology right off the bat.' And over at Wired, technologist Bruce Schneier is suggesting that biometric authentication could be hacked like anything else. 'I'm sure that someone with a good enough copy of your fingerprint and some rudimentary materials engineering capability — or maybe just a good enough printer — can authenticate his way into your iPhone,' he wrote. 'But, honestly, if some bad guy has your iPhone and your fingerprint, you've probably got bigger problems to worry about.'"
I want to be the first to show how you can use the same old fingerprint reader defeating techniques on an iPhone.
Better make sure there's not already a patent on that
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The fingerprint reader in the iPhone 5s uses a capacitive sensor, not an optical one, so Schneier's proposed hack wouldn't work.
Also, Apple requires you to create a PIN code when you enable the fingerprint sensor. If it's been 48 hours since you used the fingerprint sensor to authenticate, you have to use the PIN instead. Likewise, if you've just restarted the iPhone, you have to use the PIN for your first authentication, you can't use the fingerprint sensor.
I know it isn't always cool to support Apple, but I have to say that there are a lot of things that were just fads before they came in and did it right. Even if they didn't get it right, they normally did something to do it better, or to make it popular.
Look at how many mp3 players there were before the iPod...
Sig: I stole this sig.
The iPhone 5s doesn't store the fingerprint itself, it just stores specific data points. Apple states that the fingerprint data is stored a secure portion of the A7, and it never uploaded to iCloud, or stored on Apple's servers, and never leaves the iPhone itself.
Also, I'd be very surprised if the stored data isn't hashed.
We'll have to wait to find out exactly what they're referring to, but if implemented well this should be resistant to fingerprint lifting. Only the outer layers of your finger's skin touch objects. You'd have to have somebody else touch a sensor like this one and then try to recreate the capacitive map.
"But, honestly, if some bad guy has your iPhone and your fingerprint, you've probably got bigger problems to worry about."
Surely if they have your iPhone, they already have lots of copies of you fingerprints smeared all over it?
This technology doesn't use a fingerprint, it actually reads living tissue under the skin. The technology seems very similar because of how you use it (put your thumb here), however it is drastically different.
So no, your fingerprints on the screen won't work. They don't match the living tissue this reads.
The iPhone 5s doesn't store the fingerprint itself, it just stores specific data points. Apple states that the fingerprint data is stored a secure portion of the A7, and it never uploaded to iCloud, or stored on Apple's servers, and never leaves the iPhone itself.
Also, I'd be very surprised if the stored data isn't hashed.
It does tend to store the fingerprints of everyone who's touched it recently on the surface of the device.
And now the NSA will have a finger print database for all iphone users with minimum effort.
Stop this. Stop it this very instant. The NSA (or any other nefarious creature / corporation / government entity / evil deity) is not interested in a user's fingerprint.
First, as has been mentioned ad nauseaum, you don't get a fingerprint - you get a hash of an output off a sensor that relates to a fingerprint.
Second, even if you could reconstruct the loops and whorls of the fingerprint then so what? You leave a veritable trail of fingerprints (and DNA and a host of other things we don't want to talk about here) everywhere you haul your ugly bit of meatspace around to. Nobody cares about a single fingerprint. The only valid concern is whether or not someone can take an existing copy of your fingerprint and gain access to the device. We shall see.
IF it works (big if) then it's a fine bit of biometrics to allow you to play Angry Birds. If you are carrying more sensitive information on your iPhone and you don't have it encrypted separately from phone access, sucks to be you.
Not every bit of security has to be able to foil three letter government agencies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
if you have some super secret corporate info on your iphone you should be relying on a lot more than a consumer level fingerprint scanner for security
Especially when it's on a glass device that's covered with your fingerprints....
No sig today...
I eat two donuts at a time, you insensitive clod!
That was actually one of my first thoughts when I heard they were adding this, but I watched the keynote address, and Apple made it clear during the initial announcement that they're not uploading any fingerprint data to their servers. They further clarified afterwards that they aren't even storing the fingerprints on the local device at all. Just as good practice dictates that you store a hash of the user's password rather than the password itself, Apple is doing the same here with the fingerprint data. They store a local hash of the fingerprint rather than the fingerprint itself, then simply verify against the hash when authenticating the user.
Which isn't to say that they couldn't backdoor something in later and renege on what they've said if some secret court order came down that gagged them and compelled them to collect the data, but at least they had the decency to try and secure the data properly.
Why do you think so? Having a quick and easy way of remotely obtaining the unique hash of the fingerprint of any iPhone user could become very useful for the NSA and other agencies - law enforcement in particular. Say you lift off a fingerprint from some object and want to know whom it belongs to. You compute a hash by the same method as in the iPhone and obtain cell phone data of people who were in the vicinity of the crime scene (that's probably standard procedure by now anyway). Now wouldn't it be nice if you could quickly match your hash with those of the phone owners? The more phones have fingerprint readers, the more obviously useful would it be to have a database of fingerprint hashes or access them remotely on the phones.
Yes, they did *claim* that.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It's how you apply the tech, and what you do with it. The ATRIX 4G had a fingerprint sensor, but it was definitely a less elegant implementation, having to swipe your finger down across a sensor on the back of the phone. Apple puts it right where you always touch to activate the phone anyway, and dooesn't even make you change your behavior -- just touch. It also allows touch from any orientation and tilt of your finger so you don't have to worry about getting the touch perfect.
Fingerprint scanning while allowing the user to not do anything special to scan the fingerprint. That's the elegance. That's what's going to get it used in large numbers as opposed to the ATRIX, where it ended up being a rarely used gimmick.
I don't think Apple would make these claims (without anyone asking no less) if they weren't true. If they were storing this data, they would have been quiet about it, don't you think?
No, I don't think so. I don't have any reason to trust Apple, and you shouldn't either. You have to realize that you don't have the whole story when an agency like the NSA refers to Apple as "Big Brother". If the NSA thinks Apple is Big Brother and its customers are zombies, then why would you put any level of trust into Apple to not use your personal data however they please? Both Apple and the NSA know that Apple's customers don't care about things like that, what they care about is owning the newest Apple device, regardless of what that entails. Apple can quietly push out any update they want and people won't care once it leaves the news cycle.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Did anything change as a result?
Yes.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, the issue was one with the geodata cache being kept on iOS devices. The cache was in place to allow the device to more quickly determine its location by recognizing hotspots and cell towers that it had previously seen, rather than having to engage in a battery-draining GPS check. Due to not thinking through things as much as they should have, Apple designed the cache to clear out old data only when the cache exceeded a certain size (IIRC it was 2MB), but the result was that it could potentially have a few years' worth of geodata cached away that a malicious person could use.
Apple modified the cache's behavior in response to the incident, changing it to delete items after a few months (I believe 3).
Here is an article that explains this better than I did, written by an attorney that specializes in computer security, electronic privacy etc.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/the-unexpected-result-of-fingerprint-authentication-that-you-cant-take-the-fifth/