It absolutely isn't. Even if just the hash were sent over the wire (or if it were possible for the authorities to extract it over the wire), it would be perfectly possible for the authorities to run the same hash algorithm on their candidate print and see if the hashes match. Such evidence would likely not be admissible in court but 1) it would be enough to give the authorities a tipoff, 2) for matters deemed important enough, secret trials seem to be all the rage these days.

I would be _very_ surprised if there were no backdoor in iPhones for the authorities. Even their "secure" area. The U.S. authorities simply do not take no for an answer when having a "talk" with a vendor producing a widespread "security" related product.

I'm not sure if you understand what FUD means. Your surprise or lack thereof does not count as evidence, and is irrelevant to whether something is FUD or not.

> MS Exec: "I'd be very surprised if Linux had a lower TCO than Windows Server."

Canonical example of FUD. EXACT same thing as you're saying, just in a different context.

You've got to be careful when you say things like that, because they're trivial to refute.

The whole point of a backdoor is to be obfuscated and hard to find. So it would be very likely that you would not find one even if one were present. Your example is simply a Microsoft not bothering to do something that's perfectly researchable.

We don't have any _proof_ that Dual EC DRBG is defeatable to the NSA. By your logic we should still be using it happily until we have that proof and until then any caution is simply "FUD".

So if that's "FUD", then I've got news for you: the security world is very sensibly built upon FUD.