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> Net-net, shifting toward biometrics is good

I disagree. It's a disclosable but non-revokable authentication mechanism. If your fingerprints leak, there's no way to revoke them. If your fingerprints change, like with your friend's kid, you'll find that the systems are not designed to handle updates. It's an ID that you cannot discard but might accidentally ruin.

IMO it needs to be something that can't change, like your basic DNA, or something to that effect. We definitely do need a better way to positively identify people.

why? that's horrifying for privacy

and also a problem for my identical twins.

I just realized we thought we were being a bit cute by giving them names that meant the same thing, but in different languages. Now, I realize that if they translate their names into written Chinese, they better be phonetic translation... if they end up with identical names, same birthday, identical DNA, that could cause problems.

And how is this any different than currently using your photo ID and someone looking to see if the ID matches your face? You would still have the identical twin problem

Humans don’t need a better way to ID people, computers do

We find a dead person with no ID. Only a computer cares who they are?

Well, in any scenario where you need to verify someone's identity, privacy and anonymity not only aren't goals, but they aren't acceptable.

Now you could argue that in many situations you don't need to verify someone's identity and shouldn't have the right to do so; but if you do (like during border control) then your identity isn't supposed to be private.

Privacy is a new-age luxury that causes more problems than it's worth. I know this is unpopular, and I'm not justifying the abuse of information, but it changes nothing about the fact that we are by-and-large a social species, and being able to positively identify someone would likely have more benefits than drawbacks, because our society is organized around the idea that we know who we're working with.

The issue isn't identity but attestation or assertion of identity.

The problem with DNA, as with fingerprints, voiceprints, retina scans, and the rest, is that a small sample or simulacrum of the original object or characteristic can often create a false positive.

You leave your fingerprints, and DNA, on everything you touch, literally. Your voice is now being recorded in high fidelity at great frequency, and your eyeballs are visible to whatever it is you are looking at.

The original use-case for computer passwords, as inveted by Fernando Corbato, was in a specific facility, with a physical location and at least reasonably-limited access, largely as a measure to prevent either accidental or typically prankish mis-use of other people's computer resources. The "universe" was a few score people.

We're now relaying on passwords (and numerous other proxies for identity attestation) in a universe of roughly ten billion people, with remote 24/7/365 access and highly-automated attacking systems, over a channel which provides very narrow capabilities for high-credibility, non-spoofable assertions.

For humans interacting in person, there are many simultaneous indicia of who an individual is, particularly amongst people well-known to one another: visual appearance, voice, height, gait and carriage, mannerisms, and personal/intimate knowledge. Even for in-person identity assertion, these factors break down at scale, as our primate brains can recall the features of a few score individuals, but not many hundreds or thousands, let alone billions.

(An interesting exercise is to consider the span of a year, or your life, and how much time you could dedicate to n number of people in that time. Even over a lifetime, you can only get to know perhaps 50,000 people for an hour or more 1:1, roughly a medium-sized town's population. Not even a large city, let alone a state/province or nation, let alone the global population.)

I'm coming to feel that the idea that we can transact significant interactions at this scale (population, distance, time) may well prove to be greatly flawed. Airgapping and limited access have their benefits.

Your DNA can change, and has changed -at a spot in sensible people's arm- in recent years.

If you're referring to mRNA vaccines, one of us needs to brush up on basic cellular biology.

If you're referring to Adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccines, I believe episomal replication makes their DNA short-lived in the host. Also, as it's never reverse-transcribed into the human genome, there's a semantic argument that the Adenovirus DNA is never a part of the person's DNA, even when it is short-term resident in the nucleus.

Though, I suppose there might be some rare form of translocation that might still result in Adenovirus DNA being incorporated into the Human genome. I don't know enough about viral genetics to know the corner-case caveats associated with the claims that Adenovirus vector vaccines don't modify human DNA.

It’d be good from an individual liberty perspective if all passwords and other authentication tokens were public, like biometrics are.

(I’m not an anarchist or well-funded criminal though, so I agree with you.)

There was a story in 2015[0] where someone was able to reproduce the fingerprints of the German defense minister from a photograph.

>Jan Krissler, known in hacker circles as Starbug, used commercial software called VeriFinger and several close-range photos of von der Leyen, including one gleaned from a press release issued by her own office and another he took himself from three meters away, to reverse-engineer the fingerprint.

[0] https://www.dawn.com/news/1154284

I have yet to see biometric security done by airport security - either TSA or Clear that doesn’t show your picture when it recognizes your fingers.

The key is whether someone falsely believes they are secret.

Using your fingerprint instead of typing a username? Fine.

Using your fingerprint instead of typing a password? Uh oh.

If you are in the US, the same is true of your social security number.

But good luck with that.

Just look at the history of credit card security.

It started with just having Name / Card Number / Expiry, all of which are printed right on the card, being all that was necessary to conduct a transaction.

Then they put a magnetic strip on the back of the card and storing the same information in plain text on that strip.

Then they started printing a "secret" 3 or 4 digit number (CVC) on the card for "extra" security.

Now we have chips in cards which helps with brick and mortar transactions in an era when most transactions are online.

The latest thing some do is to issue a virtual card for just one transaction. Which as far as I can tell is actually pretty good

The next thing I'd like to see are deposit-only bank account numbers tied to your regular bank account number, so that you can give someone the information necessary for them to send you money via ACH without them having all the information necessary to drain your bank account.

At present, I transfer money into my checking account for each and every outgoing transaction, so there's both a small time window and a small limit on the amount of a theft, and I have less to worry about giving out my checking account number for incoming transfers.

> The next thing

Mildly related: At one point I was considering how easily someone could make an e-mail server where valid addresses were all in the form username+code@host, where users could create/manage valid codes using a smartphone app, noting which ones were for which purpose and having inactivity or expiry rules.

Unlike current user+anything@host forms, a the + component would be mandatory, and an incorrect/expired code means spam filtering.

You can do something similar now with email aliasing services. Also they don’t include your primary address which is easily stripped from the + format you are describing.

Its just the next SSN and we all know how great that is going

You are right if to speak about access control, but TSA, police, and the likes have other goals. They want to establish firmly one physical person <-> one DB id relation. People checked may for various reasons try to thwart such attempts. In such circumstances it's hard to come with a solution which is not bio*

It's hard to come with a solution full stop.

Right, I meant biometrics for identification, as in this TSA use case.

Biometrics for authentication/authorization are terrible, at least as currently implemented.

This is already in place. After EQ was breached, I wasn't sure who to go to, to change my Date of Birth, so it's still the same. :|

There is already a lot of truly immutable and practically immutable data that's tracked.

The other issue is the courts have dictated that you don't own your own biometrics. Phone locked with face or fingerprint? They can get a court order that allows them to force unlock it.

A pin code is considered more secure, because it can't be force bypassed, like biometrics.

This is called the 5th amendment.

That doesn't mean what you think it means.. at least not in the US, today.

1. https://fuscolaw.org/police-cant-force-you-to-unlock-your-sm...

(highlighting is mine)

This decision overrules previous circuit court rulings in California that biometric features were considered testimonies since suspects weren’t verbally giving up their numeric passcodes or passwords.

2. https://jsberrylaw.com/blog/can-police-officers-force-you-to...

The method by which you choose to lock your cellphone can make the difference between being required to unlock it for a police officer or not. Police officers cannot force you to unlock your phone by a testimonial act that reveals the contents of your mind. You can be forced to unlock your phone by a nontestimonial act.

Nontestimonial acts are things like your biometrics, your DNA, etc.

Thank you for elaborating for me. That’s what I was trying to say but my response was lazy.

I had a big problem with fingerprints and hand geometry stuff after recovering from some serious burns. They had to delete my account to readd me into the system because it changed so much.

I worked with a woman that didn't have fingerprints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adermatoglyphia

> The disorder was informally nicknamed "immigration delay disease" by Professor Peter Itin after his first patient had trouble traveling to the U.S. without any fingerprints for identification.

Thank you for the chuckle, Professor Peter Itin!

The TSA has mechanisms for that already.

I have fingerprints. But because I have Cerebral Palsy that affects my left hand, it’s almost impossible for me To stretch it out to get good fingerprints.

TSA can bypass it and just say “missing fingers” with a note.

When I had to get my fingerprints rolled at the police station for a background check, they also have a standardized form

I've anecdotally heard that lifelong chefs can also end up with no or unusable fingerprints after repeated burns and extensive calluses.

Operators of industrial equipment and machines such as welders usually lose their prints over the years too.

I worked with a Nepali cook who had no fingerprints. It was from continuous burning. He would also reach into a colander propped in boiling water to pull out and plate pasta. He was so desensitized to pain that he was not careful of the cooks around him. The guy to his right requested a shift transfer because he kept getting burned.

"a person from Switzerland who lacked fingerprints. The phenotype was mapped to chromosome 4q22. In the splice-site of a 3' exon of the gene for SMARCAD1-helicase, a point mutation was detected."

In the future parents might want to genetically modify their children to have this mutation :)

I was pouring concrete a bunch this past summer for a project around my house. Even wearing gloves, the concrete wore down my fingerprints to a smooth texture (and I had scabbed over wounds in spots too, thankfully no scarring). My fingerprint readers on my devices didn't work for much of the summer.

I'm old enough that my fingerprints have largely worn off. My Air M1 won't recognize my index finger, and my thumb is 50/50. At least my iWatch mostly works, when it isn't complaining that the wifi is too weak (because I'm not holding my wrist in the correct orientation).

As a result, I'm sure "updating your stored biometrics" is such an alien impossibility to these agencies because they have completely bought into the myth that your biometrics never change.

Clear just updated my fingerprints and Face ID last week. I’m sure TSA can do it to

How do they prevent phishing / identity theft?

This sounds like the worst of all tradeoffs:

- Your credentials are public

- If you want to change them because they were cloned, you need to undergo surgery

- There’s a non-surgical path that allows an attacker to replace your credentials with theirs

I mean you act as if they have to store your fingerprints as a clear image. They match your fingerprint and then your picture is displayed on the screen and you have to scan your boarding pass.

Your fingerprint is stored as a number. The camera identifies repeating patterns, similar to a QR code, which reads like a number. You wouldn't even need a print, if you could spoof the right sequence.

The uniqueness of fingerprints is also disputed by many, and I also suspect the accuracy of these new facial technologies...

too much money, too little oversight for me to trust them

> uniqueness of fingerprints is also disputed by many

But, who cares? Security at the scales the TSA operates at is not an absolute but probabilistic.

What they can do is lower the possibility of accidental mismatches to some acceptable level, and to increase the cost for an attacker. That is all they can do. And they have to do this at scale with acceptable externalities.

Yeah, finger prints are not 100% unique, neither are they 100% foolproof, so what?

>>so what?

When it is a government agency preventing my free unrestricted travel I think we should have a higher standard and a better response than "so what"

There are 2 options here,

1. They fail open meaning "security" is compromised and thus pointless

2. They fail closed meaning they will violate the rights of citizens to freely travel or place undue hardship on them because their systems failed putting the traveler through additional "screening"

neither should be acceptable to anyone that values a free society

> There are 2 options here,

Plus obviously the third "on failure we employ more/different scrutiny as a fallback mechanism" which handles the many edge cases while maintaining an acceptable level of security.

> They fail open meaning "security" is compromised and thus pointless

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Statistically, what are the chances that they fail open with

- someone bought a ticket with someone else’s name

- they got through biometric checks where they verify your ID and look at a picture to see if it matches

- the scanners fail to detect something dangerous

- and the person meant to do something wrong?

When biometrics fail, they look at your physical ID

I locked myself out of fingerprint unlock for something like a week on several devices after a limited amount of cleaning with citric acid and a scrubbing pad.

Fingerprints need fallbacks.

The fallback is your password

Where can I set my TSA password?

That'll be your passport. Annoying, but there's absolutely a procedure for unmatched biometrics.

So just use passports? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> just use passports? If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Anyone who travels in America and doesn’t see security as broken has been visited by the patron saints of patience.

Any miscreant wanting to cause the greatest mayham, could easily target TSA waiting lines, yet this never happens… Almost like the threat isn't as high as it is portrayed to be.

They use both. They crosscheck you against stored biometric data from the passport, and also the data stored in the passport against data previously seen.

If something is not matching they put additional scrutiny on you.

It is not perfect. Super spies, and determined smart criminals are going to be able to defeat it, but it raises the bar.

I almost forgot about my own travel facial recognition failure two weekends ago...

I ran into the same problem with British Airways at Heathrow a few years ago. Face was scanned at initial entry point, then failed at the gate during boarding. After a few tries at getting the system to match my facial scan from a few hours prior, the gate attendant gave up, had me stand aside, let everybody else board, I got on dead last. Thankfully my wife's face matched, so she got on and managed to keep a spot in the overhead for my baggage.

> my toddler still has trouble telling my infant identical twins apart

What does your toddler have to do with this? Is the toddler in charge of getting the infants through TSA?

I know facial recognition algorithms and human facial recognition work wildly differently. However, the two faces are similar enough that several months of training, with some ability to choose perspective, isn't sufficient for my oldest to be able to distinguish the twins. In order for me to be confident which of my twins I'm looking at, I need a view at least 30 degrees off center from the left side to get a clear enough view of the subtle difference in the shape of the top of the left ear.

I'm not confident a one-shot algorithm can reliably distinguish them without also sometimes believing one of them is two different people.

> United has some system that scans your face at the check-in counter, and uses facial recognition in lieu of scanning your boarding pass at the gate.

I don't think it's an airline thing. I've had the same at LAX boarding an Air France (codeshare with Delta) flight, and it seemed to be all over the place there.

Biometrics at most should be a username with consent, not a username+password pair for this reason.

I always remember bricklayers don't have fingerprints.

(also me apparently - when my fingers are wet)

I've gone through several periods where I had no fingerprints (and probably will again), as a side-effect of some hobby project or another.

Instant glue got you too?

High quality superglue is removable with a “debonder”. Here’s an example product:

https://bsi-inc.com/hardware/un_cure.html

No, CA is no problem. It's usually about prolonged use of mild acids, prolonged handling of rough materials, that sort of thing.

No one is proposing using biometrics exclusively. There is always physical id as backup

Well not yet. The world has done dumber things before