Something you are is the perfect form of authentication.
If you had a guard sitting at a door with only biometric information about the people they’re supposed to let in: faces, fingerprints, DNA samples, voice samples, etc. you could not fool them. Why? Because they can authenticate that the reading is coming from the actual person.
This is the revolution. If your phone can with good enough accuracy determine that it’s looking at a real alive attentive human face or a real finger then it’s game over. It’s an auth cred that can literally only be used by you, it can’t be copied, stolen, hacked, phished, and can be totally public while being useless to an attacker because they can’t mint a live human with real matching fingerprint.
If you think of biometric auth as “present a picture of your fingerprint” and not “present your actual finger” then of course you arrive at the conclusion that they’re useless as a credential.
Some may feel this is acceptable with the thought if your not guilty then you should have nothing to hide, but this is a fallacy as it tramples over our 4th amendment rights. With passwords locked in your head, you cannot be forced to give that information as that is protected by the 5th amendment. Accessing the device or any information protected by a password must then be done with other means or not admissible as longer delays violates due process.
On the other hand, it was reported in the UK (?) that law enforcement follows around suspects, wait for them to unlock their phone in public and tackle them before they re lock it.
> But at 3:15 p.m., the quiet was broken when, out of nowhere, a young woman in street clothes charged toward Ulbricht yelling, "I'm so sick of you!" and grabbed his laptop. Ulbricht leapt from his seat to grab it back, when the half dozen other readers at nearby tables suddenly lunged for him, pushing him up against a window.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/dead-end-o...
Though the British police are using it as well:
> Undercover surveillance officers trailed Yew and waited for him to unlock his phone to make a call - thereby disabling the encryption. One officer then rushed in to seize the phone from Yew's hand
If the government will condone torture to get information out of people because of the “War on Terror”, why wouldn’t they do the same for the “War on Drugs”?
The tactic you mentioned has been used here in the US aswell. Something similar was done to DPR that brought down The Silk Road.
You should be able to answer those yourself. Legal rights are not trumpt by illegal tactics, no matter what information is recovered.
No, but it happens all of the time.
Is any evidence gained through torture admissable?
If the police lie and say the person wasn’t tortured or do you believe that police don’t lie?
Are any law enforcement allowed to use torture to gain access to information?
Yes and police never lie and district attorneys never illegally withhold evidence from the defense....
You’re making a lot of assumptions that police, judges, and district attorneys play by the rules and that overworked public defenders have the time or the will to be great advocates for defenders.
Disagree. A bank manger with a gun held to their head is not a bank manager for the intended purposes.
The bank manager is still authentically the bank manager, gun or not.
If we go by your definition login with id and password isn't authentication either. How would we know if the person is "intending to authenticate"!
Because in the other scenario the bank manager can be killed and the murderer can still use the "key" (the bank manager's lifeless face). Dead or alive the bank manager is still that same person.
With a password there's more security for the bank manager. If the robber kills the manager then the robber can't get in.
Biometric auth needs an "under duress" mechanism to be at all comparable.
If knife guy comes for me and says "Your phone and password or your life" I can give it to him. It's kind of important that I can or else he'll take my bloody finger with him and body integrity is way more important to me than any amount of my data.
Literally, I prefer my fingers attached and you can clear my bank account rather than the alternative.
I think relinquishable credentials are quite useful for a number of delegation related uses - but if they are relinquishable then they need to be expirable as well.
There currently is nothing secret like that that I'd give up my life to protect, and I can't conceive of anything of such import existing... for those cases where the item is truly dangerous (like the nuclear football) then a guy with a knife being a threat is already a failure of security.
You may not be able to give these things but they can be taken, using that knife.
Just... biometrics are such a terrible idea - let's not even open that door.
And now, that phones are moving toward face recognition isn’t kind of a moot point?
https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/iphone-5s/will-your-severed-fi...
From a practical standpoint, if someone was willing to cut off your finger, wouldn’t it be easier to just force you a gunpoint to unlock your phone? Someone who really wanted what’s on your phone bad enough to try the “unreliable” hack, would just force you to unlock your phone or give up the password.
What??? Of course you could. That's why no building that cares about security actually relies on a human guard for authorization.
Is this still a thing? It sounds decent to me. Most auth usually uses 1 or 2 from the list but rarely all 3.
> MFA
> Definition(s):
> Authentication using two or more different factors to achieve authentication. Factors include: (i) something you know (e.g., password/PIN); (ii) something you have (e.g., cryptographic identification device, token); or (iii) something you are (e.g., biometric). See Authenticator.
> Source(s):
> NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4 under Multifactor Authentication
You'd be in just about the same place if instead of saying "you need biometrics" you said "You need 2 devices".
Even number 2 can be done wrong. 2 Doesn't work if the thing you have is a knowledge based thing. 2 only works if in the case that it responds correctly to a stimulus. Think things like RSA.
You really are categorizing authentication factors by their weaknesses:
- Knowledge factors can be discovered/guessed and duplicated
- Possession factors should protect against guessing and duplication, but can be physically stolen
- Inherence factors should protect against guessing, duplication and physical theft, but cannot be replaced
Writing down a password doesn't make it an effective physical factor, just like embedding an NFC chip in your arm doesn't make it an effective biometric.
Similarly, SMS authentication is not #2. The mapping of your phone number to your phone is not something you possess, it is sitting in some phone company system somewhere and it can be changed.
They are rather one of the three classes of authentication factors, all of which have fundamental drawbacks. This is why you should always require more than a single class of factor as part of your authentication. For example, mobile devices typically require both physical possession as well as a knowledge or biometric challenge.
Leaving fingerprints on your device is why fingerprints aren't the best factor for mobile devices. Captured biometric data being snooped and replayed is why remote biometrics are weaker than biometrics done locally.
You can have a Web Authentication authenticator (e.g. FIDO 2 key) act as multiple different credentials, all unlocked with the same biometric. Biometrics being tied to a single account (or an account being tied to a single biometric) is an implementation detail, same as having only a single account per email address on a site is today.
A good portion of the revolutionizing is trying to optimize the UX, not authentication. The core fundamentals of authentication have been known for a while, to the point we have government standards such as NIST 800-63b. Of course, some of the revolutionary UX turns out to not implement the fundamentals correctly, because it's the tech industry.
Actually that’d be a cool idea for an auto wipe feature! If you blink a Morris code SOS it should send out a 911 alert with your location and then permanently lock the phone.
You cannot change them, you leave this data everywhere and this data can be snooped and replayed easily.
Moreover, this data is singular for a person - its hard to assign yourself multiple roles or have multiple sets of credentials with different permissions or for different services.
We collectively should stop revolutionizing the access control sphere and use boring scheme with passwords, pins and tokens.