If the New iPhone Has Fingerprint Authentication, Can It Be Hacked?

wired.com

5 points·denzil_correa··5 comments

According to this article,

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/siri-two-years/

Apple keeps Siri voice recordings for two years. It appears from recently published patents that the Authentec sensor depends on an external CPU to perform hashing operations on the biometric signature. This suggests that a raw image of fingerprints is at least available to the iPhone's processor and could be transmitted back to a data centre for storage.

It's not obvious, but the article was written by Bruce Schneier.

Ha! Conspiracy. Is apply working for the NSA?

Apple would be insane to have a centralized database with all the fingerprints. It's bad enough that NSA can even get your individual data as you sync your iPhone with your iTunes on a computer. Having it on a central server means they can get tens or hundreds of millions of fingerprints in one nice scoop.

Apple already has a database of voice samples. Siri works by transmitting voice requests back to Apple's data centre where they are interpreted into text. Voice samples in the database, if it exists, may be indexed by identity, location, background noise, topic, and correlated activity. Not sure how feasible it might be to synthesise ad hoc utterances in the voice of a known person using that database, but it could certainly be used as a voice print comparison to identify individuals by sound.

ETA: speculation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com