Early models of smartphones were safer than newer models - How come?
Hitoshi Kokumai
Advocate of Identity Assurance by Citizens' Volition and Memory. Founder and Chief Architect at Mnemonic Identity Solutions Limited
Early iPhones only with PINCODE were safer than the newer iPhones with TouchID and FaceID added. The same observation applies to the newer models of all the smartphones, PCs and tablets that come with biometrics.
The point is that even a perfectly hacking-proof biometrics could only provide the level of security lower than a PINCODE-only authentication when the biometrics is deployed in 'multi-entrance' method with a PINCODE as a default fallback measure against false rejection (false non-match).
This is what a logical reasoning inevitably leads us to, as illustrated in the picture above and in this brief video.
Biometrics might help security in physical space where there are competent managers who are ready to take care of falsely rejected people. But, in cyber space, the fallback measure against falsely rejection (an extra entrance) has to be provided by the falsely rejected people themselves.
The security effect of ‘multi-entrance’ deployment of 2 authenticators as against ‘multi-layer’ deployment is quantitatively examined in this article "Quantitative Examination of Multiple Authenticator Deployment"
A huge amount of resources have been spent for a huge volume of biometrics products. We could say that the resources were well spent if all the users and consumers had knowingly adopted the biometrics solutions as a convenience-improving tool, not a security- enhancing solution. We doubt it is the case.
Sharing our observation may well be enormously embarrassing and inconvenient for the people who had advocated, promoted, recommended and marketed the biometrics products as a security enhancing tool.
Opting to stay silent could be taken as opting to be complicit. We could be somewhat sympathetic in view of the collective pressure of the environment, but their children and grandchildren may be just unsympathetic. We would like to recommend them to come out and speak up sooner than later.
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#identity #authentication #password #security #safety #ethic #privacy #civilrights #democracy #biometrics
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4 年I agree with you. It is better to place 4 doors to the house, 1 leading to the other until you have unlocked all 4 doors to be able to get access. The fingerprint authentication should lead you to a pattern authentication and then a pin code. That to me is more secure than either one getting you through. GREAT INSIGHTS!
Information Security Researcher, Academician, Entrepreneur | Password & Cybersecurity, Digital Identity, Biometrics Limit, 3D Education | Linux Trainer | Writer | Podcast Host
5 年Reading this article and viewing the videos make me ponder over security vulnerabilities of passcode / pincode and biometrics.
ITS Consultant Cybersecurity at Capgemini
5 年I disagree: The possible maximum level of login control isn't lower - it just hasn't changed that much: You still can keep biometrics deactivated and use a strong passcode on smartphones. But besides this hypothetical maximum, what is about user's "standard usage" of smartphones? The compromise between security and convenience for smartphone login, many users in the old days used, was: Use a short PINCODE or none at all. Nowadays the compromise is more and more: Use biometrics as an alternative to a strong passcode. And the biometrics is (should be) combined with some mitigating factors like: If you don't use biometrics for some tenth hours it will no longer be accepted as valid until the passcode is used again. So an attacker of biometrics has only a somehow limited time window to launch the biometrics attack. This does not make such attacks impossible, but enforces them to more advanced: The synthetic attack replacement for the biometrics need to be generated inside this time window.? On the other hand there are known attack vectors for PINCODE, e.g by starting some rooted boot image and launching a brute force attack ignoring any "reset device after 10 failures" or similar. A security chip can slow down such brute force attacks by delaying the verification of a PIN? - but in case of a 4 digit PINCODE attack, this can't be any useful limitations. Calculate yourself how slow a single verification would need to be, so the 10.000 tries for 4 digit take long enough. So at least in the case, where an old smartphone was used with only 4 digit PIN and is now used with biometrics and a strong passcode, I doubt, the modern smartphone access control could be named less secure. But for sure it is far more convenient than the old setup. Just for those that had wished that biometrics access control could just be added ( aka logical "AND") as an additional factor to the authentication: Sorry, no. That is not (yet?) possible in modern smartphones. So keep biometrics deactivated in such cases - and of course ensure, you use a very strong passcode.