From a theoretical point of view or practical?
Username is simply an ID. Password is how we truly verify who the user is.
Bio-metrics are just convenient because they are unique and hard\impossible to replicate.
Username is simply an ID. Password is how we truly verify who the user is.
Bio-metrics are just convenient because they are unique and hard\impossible to replicate.
But if your biometric is able to be faked, you can't change it like you can change a typical text based password. There's no "reset your password" equivalent for biometrics.
The signal from the sensor is used as a "seed" to generate key using robust cryptography
Different sensors will output different "data" based on the sensor type.
right, who would do that... i mean for what purpose...
FIDO simply wants to make authentication stronger, you can use hardware keys that have a key burnt into them which is unique and much harder to brute-force than passwords.
Again according to how biometrics are described in whitepapers\industry, we extract features from the fingerprint\face sometimes very little compared to the actual biometric and use it to derive a key. that key cannot be reversed to get the original features and different algorithms use different features.
"As a result, the early common belief among the biometrics community of templates irreversibility has been proven wrong. It is now an accepted fact that it is possible to reconstruct from an unprotected template a synthetic sample that matches the bona fide one."
-- Reversing the irreversible: A survey on inverse biometrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016740481...
> there are studies showing that the hash could be reversible, that is, it could be possible to obtain the original biometric pattern, especially if the secret of the key used to generate the hash is violated
So yes, there are secret keys involved (which the user has no control over), and no, I've never read through the code of a biometric implementation, but ultimately the space of possible values that someone's face or finger could reliably display is much smaller than even MD5, so it can be brute-forced.
If you have some non-random internet page to justify yourself, and show how much entropy is contained in a biometric hash, and how resistant to cracking that hash is, and how well secured those secret keys are, then I'd be happy to learn more.
[0] https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/publication/joint_pap...
also you
> We leave biometric traces everywhere, all the time. do you cover your face and wear gloves in public? hmmmm...
Unless you have a drivers license in California where they require inked versions of your biometrics.
Isn't it a fair argument that secret keys should be mutable by the user? In the future, some unforeseen event COULD occur which compromises or otherwise renders the particular biometric unusable. Now what?
I think what you want is secret keys completely detached from the user. we have that as well with hardware tokens.
As I explained you can't get the fingerprint from the device\key, it is simply not there.
This isn't the problem of the implementation\technology if someone stole your fingerprint. it didn't lead to your biometrics compromised
What's easier to do? stealing someone's fingerprint or cracking\guessing their password.
Definitely the latter.
> Definitely the latter.
You sure about that? A properly generated (i.e. random) password won't be cracked or guessed in any reasonable amount of time, whereas a model of your fingerprint(s) can be lifted from any object you've touched and used to create a silicone mold capable of fooling many fingerprint readers. And you only have 10 of them at best; once all your fingerprints are known to potential attackers that's it; you can't use fingerprint authentication any more for the rest of your life.
Do you even listen to what you're describing here? trailing someone, trying to extract fingerprints? this isn't a Jame Bond movie.
Cyber attacks are common because they are completely digital\anonymous by nature.
Secondly, humans can't remember\generate truly secure passwords, unique for every account they own. they usually rely on a tool like a password manager.
PM are definitely better than weak passwords but are actually weaker than biometrics. they are a central point of failure and have been attacked in the past.
For the average Joe, biometrics are more secure since he is not using such tool anyways.
It doesn't take James Bond to lift some fingerprints off a surface. Anyone with physical proximity and a little practice can manage that much. People have managed to fool fingerprint readers with Gummi Bears before, much less specially-designed equipment. It's a practical attack, unlike attempting to brute-force a truly random 10-character password from a 78-character alphabet (uppercase, lowercase, digits, and half of the 32 symbols on a PC-104 keyboard).
> Secondly, humans can't remember\generate truly secure passwords, unique for every account they own. they usually rely on a tool like a password manager.
Which is perfectly fine. You aren't going to break their password manager either. The weak point is the users who aren't using password managers, because they try to get by with less-than-random passwords which are susceptible to cracking. Or biometrics, which aren't secret at all.
Password based biometrics is the last place I would look at for biometric compromise.
We leave biometric traces everywhere, all the time. do you cover your face and wear gloves in public? hmmmm...
a photo\mask isn't perfect and actually in some instances they fail to work vs sensors because of that.
It is more of a question of how robust is the authentication method.(can a photo\mask fool it? which can happen sometime but usually require pretty high quality sample)