Entries Tagged "biometrics"

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Troy Hunt on Passwords

Troy Hunt has a good essay about why passwords are here to stay, despite all their security problems:

This is why passwords aren’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future and why [insert thing here] isn’t going to kill them. No amount of focusing on how bad passwords are or how many accounts have been breached or what it costs when people can’t access their accounts is going to change that. Nor will the technical prowess of [insert thing here] change the discussion because it simply can’t compete with passwords on that one metric organisations are so focused on: usability. Sure, there’ll be edge cases and certainly there remain scenarios where higher-friction can be justified due to either the nature of the asset being protected or the demographic of the audience, but you’re not about to see your everyday e-commerce, social media or even banking sites changing en mass.

He rightly points out that biometric authentication systems—like Apple’s Face ID and fingerprint authentication—augment passwords rather than replace them. And I want to add that good two-factor systems, like Duo, also augment passwords rather than replace them.

Hacker News thread.

Posted on November 5, 2018 at 10:24 AM • View Comments

Apple FaceID Hacked

It only took a week:

On Friday, Vietnamese security firm Bkav released a blog post and video showing that—by all appearances—they’d cracked FaceID with a composite mask of 3-D-printed plastic, silicone, makeup, and simple paper cutouts, which in combination tricked an iPhone X into unlocking.

The article points out that the hack hasn’t been independently confirmed, but I have no doubt it’s true.

I don’t think this is cause for alarm, though. Authentication will always be a trade-off between security and convenience. FaceID is another biometric option, and a good one. I wouldn’t be less likely to use it because of this.

FAQ from the researchers.

Posted on November 15, 2017 at 6:54 AM • View Comments

Apple's FaceID

This is a good interview with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering about FaceID.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think. I am confident that Apple is not collecting a photo database, but not optimistic that it can’t be hacked with fake faces. I dislike the fact that the police can point the phone at someone and have it automatically unlock. So this is important:

I also quizzed Federighi about the exact way you “quick disabled” Face ID in tricky scenarios—like being stopped by police, or being asked by a thief to hand over your device.

“On older phones the sequence was to click 5 times [on the power button], but on newer phones like iPhone 8 and iPhone X, if you grip the side buttons on either side and hold them a little while—we’ll take you to the power down [screen]. But that also has the effect of disabling Face ID,” says Federighi. “So, if you were in a case where the thief was asking to hand over your phone—you can just reach into your pocket, squeeze it, and it will disable Face ID. It will do the same thing on iPhone 8 to disable Touch ID.”

That squeeze can be of either volume button plus the power button. This, in my opinion, is an even better solution than the “5 clicks” because it’s less obtrusive. When you do this, it defaults back to your passcode.

More:

It’s worth noting a few additional details here:

  • If you haven’t used Face ID in 48 hours, or if you’ve just rebooted, it will ask for a passcode.
  • If there are 5 failed attempts to Face ID, it will default back to passcode. (Federighi has confirmed that this is what happened in the demo onstage when he was asked for a passcode—it tried to read the people setting the phones up on the podium.)
  • Developers do not have access to raw sensor data from the Face ID array. Instead, they’re given a depth map they can use for applications like the Snap face filters shown onstage. This can also be used in ARKit applications.
  • You’ll also get a passcode request if you haven’t unlocked the phone using a passcode or at all in 6.5 days and if Face ID hasn’t unlocked it in 4 hours.

Also be prepared for your phone to immediately lock every time your sleep/wake button is pressed or it goes to sleep on its own. This is just like Touch ID.

Federighi also noted on our call that Apple would be releasing a security white paper on Face ID closer to the release of the iPhone X. So if you’re a researcher or security wonk looking for more, he says it will have “extreme levels of detail” about the security of the system.

Here’s more about fooling it with fake faces:

Facial recognition has long been notoriously easy to defeat. In 2009, for instance, security researchers showed that they could fool face-based login systems for a variety of laptops with nothing more than a printed photo of the laptop’s owner held in front of its camera. In 2015, Popular Science writer Dan Moren beat an Alibaba facial recognition system just by using a video that included himself blinking.

Hacking FaceID, though, won’t be nearly that simple. The new iPhone uses an infrared system Apple calls TrueDepth to project a grid of 30,000 invisible light dots onto the user’s face. An infrared camera then captures the distortion of that grid as the user rotates his or her head to map the face’s 3-D shape­—a trick similar to the kind now used to capture actors’ faces to morph them into animated and digitally enhanced characters.

It’ll be harder, but I have no doubt that it will be done.

More speculation.

I am not planning on enabling it just yet.

Posted on September 19, 2017 at 6:44 AM • View Comments

Another iPhone Change to Frustrate the Police

I recently wrote about the new ability to disable the Touch ID login on iPhones. This is important because of a weirdness in current US law that protects people’s passcodes from forced disclosure in ways it does not protect actions: being forced to place a thumb on a fingerprint reader.

There’s another, more significant, change: iOS now requires a passcode before the phone will establish trust with another device.

In the current system, when you connect your phone to a computer, you’re prompted with the question “Trust this computer?” and you can click yes or no. Now you have to enter in your passcode again. That means if the police have an unlocked phone, they can scroll through the phone looking for things but they can’t download all of the contents onto a another computer without also knowing the passcode.

More details:

This might be particularly consequential during border searches. The “border search” exception, which allows Customs and Border Protection to search anything going into the country, is a contentious issue when applied electronics. It is somewhat (but not completely) settled law, but that the U.S. government can, without any cause at all (not even “reasonable articulable suspicion”, let alone “probable cause”), copy all the contents of my devices when I reenter the country sows deep discomfort in myself and many others. The only legal limitation appears to be a promise not to use this information to connect to remote services. The new iOS feature means that a Customs office can browse through a device—a time limited exercise—but not download the full contents.

Posted on September 15, 2017 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.