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Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, what's the worst thing that could result from MasterCard having a hash of my handprint?

Unfortunately when it's "stolen", you can't be issued a new fingerprint. Worse, you leave them everywhere. I think it would be naive to believe this won't become a method of committing fraud, perhaps even a common one.

It’s hard to tell how it works from the article, but this is not a major issue if it’s used as a second factor for authentication. Apple Pay is an adequate system imo. It requires both your face and your physical phone to make a payment.

It’s not exactly a realistic threat that someone steals your phone and builds a model of your face to use at a retail checkout.

I could see biometrics being used as an alternative to card pins where you tap your card and then scan your hand. This would be more secure than the current system where you can tap under $200 with no authentication.

I am always impressed by the ingenuity the people have to exploit the security systems, bump keys, car proximity keys signal relay, car bluetooth opening from Tesla, "card readers" in ATMs, non secure Wifi poisoning, etc.

These were all non realistic threat.

This makes me very conservative with all these integrations and more software running and databases to just make it more convenient than a 4 digit PIN.

>These were all non realistic threat.

They still are. How many stories are there of people actually having their cars stolen via remote relay attacks? It gets demoed a lot in proof of concepts but I have never heard of it being actually executed. Why on earth would someone build fake fingerprints when they can just walk in to a designer handbag store with a knife, grab a few bags, and resell on facebook market place.

Credit cards don't _need_ bulletproof security, they just need to be secure enough. Fraud can often be reversed and fraudsters don't get away with it many times since there is CCTV in every location that takes card. The card companies would rather opt to eat the losses on any non reversible fraud because the profits of a friction less user experience is worth more.

Or just require the PIN for all transactions?

I have a hard time believing that the gas station down the street is going to adopt high quality scanners that can process my handprint faster than I can type my PIN.

Assuming the hand scan can't be forged or stolen, which is a big assumption and probably not true based on how other biometric scans have failed to be secure, I think I would be concerned about revealing too much data about myself.

I don't know how 'leaky' the hand print scan is meaning how much MasterCard learns from the scan. But imagine if they could figure out which people were more susceptible to buying say alcohol or coffee when they examine the hand print and then displaying an ad to get the person to make a last second purchase that is targeted to that person.

MasterCard can already track your location by seeing where you are buying things and they can watch your purchases which is a lot but who knows what can be learned from a hand print scan. But I think also hackers are very motivated so the security issues are probably understated.

There will be no situation in which a mugger could get something from you

Don't have your card/phone on you? No worries! We can still force your hand to withdraw money

Is the idea that they chop your hand off?

If it's just that they hold a gun to your head and make you authenticate with your palm, then they can do that right now. Once the gun is to the head you're kinda compelled to do what they're saying regardless of whether you authenticate with biometrics, password, whatever.

In the town where I live we have a murderer (alleged, admittedly) who cut off his victim's thumb to access the victim's phone: https://www.daytondailynews.com/crime/bail-set-at-15m-for-tr...

The first paragraph also says he killed the other guy. Even if he didn’t cut off his thumb…

The idea is that even if someone points a gun at you they can't do anything to you immediately if you don't have a phone or a credit card with you (as far as I know anyway). But with biometrics no matter what precautions you take, you'll always be in a position to give people your stuff by force

So is the threat model that the guy mugging you points a gun at you, then walks you to a store that supports Mastercard bio authentication, and while holding you at gun point, forces you to buy some fungible good from the store that they then rob from you?

…does that not seem incredibly convoluted? And not even that damaging for you, it’s obviously and clearly fraudulent, you’d have no issue getting the chargeback.

I can imagine the future involving the removal of ATMs tbh. They are becoming less and less of a requirement in modern economies.

In a world with same day delivery I also imagined a future with fewer cell phone stores, but they still seem to be everywhere. At the very least there seems to be bank branches everywhere and they will always have ATMs.

MasterCard gets hacked (or someone internal steals the data, same effect). Now someone can imitate you to MasterCard, buy expensive stuff, and blame you.

Worse is if everyone uses the same hash as MasterCard. Say, the IRS, or the passport office, or the police. That's outside the scope of your question, though, which was if only MasterCard had the hash.

When it comes to the police, if they’re after you, can’t they follow you and just lift your biometrics from something you touched?

That requires effort. A seize order doesn't, and the cops have already adapted at using third parties like Google [1] to get access to data they should not have in any decent legal system.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...

The very worst? Probably something to do with your hand hash coincidentally being the same digit sequence as a nuclear launch code, and some unfortunate internet misrouting.

I tell you, this biometrics stuff, we need to watch out...

They sell access to their database to law enforcement, even though it was never designed for that, and your reputation is ruined by false accusations (if you're rich), or you're executed (if you're in the US and black).

I assume law enforcement would have access to this also but a hand scan I think is just a vein scan. So I don't know how useful it is to law enforcement but I would be extremely suspicious of large monopolies working with government against citizens. I may be wrong about how useful it is to LE.

It says you just wave your hand over the scanner, so, even if it is a vein scan, LE could probably start putting similar cameras up to scan passers by without their knowledge. (This would obviously also work for facial recognition, but with existing cameras.)

A 1/1,000,000 chance of falsely matching a face is a non-issue for payment validation. For a law enforcement search, it means the computer will auto-fabricate local suspects.

Prosecutors in the US are judged on conviction rates. They have no incentive to worry about bogus matches. (And the ones that don't let such things slow them down tend to be promoted.)

MC eventually leaks the database of handprints, yours is used to make a fake rubber handprint that ends up on a gun involved in a crime. Police has evidence, your weak argument that you were in a bar that night gets dismissed by the judge, nobody believes you.

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