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Comment by nybble41 | Hacker News Reader

> What's easier to do? stealing someone's fingerprint or cracking\guessing their password.

> 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.

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Really? can you back this up? I can. I work in the cyber industry for a decade now. I've seen the data, I've seen attempt to bypass both. Biometrics are by far better for the vast vast majority of people.

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.

> this isn't a Jame Bond movie.

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.

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