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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

Yup, you just nailed it. Here is the best writing on just that I've found (and have shared before on HN):

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user...

Biometric data makes for great usernames, but not so much for a password. How do you "reset" your brainwaves? The wishy-washy part of TFA on that made me question the entire premise.

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I don't remember where I heard it but someone said something along the lings of "You shouldn't use something that you leave everywhere and can never change as a secure token"

That's not a complete complaint. If the password were your brainwaves, why would you still need to reset it? Did someone else steal your brain and you need to make sure they no longer have access?

> Did someone else steal your brain and you need to make sure they no longer have access?

Password databases get compromised all the time; so would a "brainprint" database. You can change a password.

That's what one-way hash functions are for. You never store the raw fingerprint data, just its unique salted hash so the data cannot be reused elsewhere.

It only takes one case of blatant disregard by a trusted source to spoil the entire process. What do you do when the scandal leaks that X Co didn't do due diligence and now 100 million of their customer's brainprints are leaked and able to be compromised?

That's the same reasoning for text passwords, yet there are huge password dumps every year.

It only takes one place where security standards aren't implemented properly to have your print leaked forever.

Never mind a malicious user managing to alter the code to leak the print before it's hashed.

Or even someone physically accosting you and retrieving a brain scan. They could do the same thing and force you to give up a password, but at least the password you can change later on.

> Or even someone physically accosting you and retrieving a brain scan. They could do the same thing and force you to give up a password, but at least the password you can change later on.

For that matter, a password is always your choice to reveal or not, taking the cost and alternative into account. Biometric information isn't.

Or messing with the RNG so that the salt isn't actually random. That would never happen :)

Security measures are going to have to deal with situations where people are potentially acting under compulsion and need plausible deniability.

No they don't. American credit cards handle it the right way already with minimal technology around security. Make a good-faith attempt to validate, but generally treat the transaction as legitimate. If it was not, help law enforcement investigate, and make the compromised party whole as a cost of doing business. Bonus points if you can extort that last part from your vendor in the contract you have with them.

Given they are measuring a response to a photo, change the photo? This seems much more like challenge-response than other forms of biometric data.

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