Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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).