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Comment by cwilson | Hacker News Reader

Apple specifically stated that your fingerprint is stored and encrypted only on the A7 chip, and not iCloud or anywhere else.

It's mentioned in the video as well: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch

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Yes. And how exactly do we check this? Why is it that we can still trust Apple? For all we know, the data gets sent directly to the NSA or, if it doesn't, there might be some secret backdoor that will make the device send the data at a later point. The last round of leaks was specifically talking about backdoors with all bigger US companies in order to circumvent encryption.

That's what I means by "we have to consider the iPhones backdoored". Once you can't trust the device any more, all bets are off and thus we can't be sure that what Apple says they do with that fingerprint is what they actually are doing.

(edit: regarding jailbreaking, I seriously doubt that a sufficiently well-hidden backdoor would be found by a jailbreaker. Or have we found the backdoors in OSX or Windows yet? Since the latest leak, we know they are there)

I'm pretty sure, when they jailbreak it the truth will come out. And I doubt Apple would take the risk for lying about that.

Who has the decryption key?

In the ideal world, there is no decryption key. They should use a one-way hash of the encoded fingerprint.

They might want to do approximate matching, though. That could make it hard or impossible to do without the decryption key.

Which is also when we can start hacking it for fun and profit.

Well, as a computer/network security professional, historically there are plenty examples of companies who have lied about the security of their systems (eg. "without your password, our flash drives cannot be decrypted" when in fact the key is not related to the password and stored in plaintext in a sector on the drive).

Would you be able to give some examples? I enjoy reading those types of stories.

Well, you can sniff packets in/out I guess and know if the process will or not send info to the internet.

This is incorrect - we do not know any particular products which are backdoored.

edit: Also, there is a difference between a subtle crypto vulnerability and sending data to a server that, according to the announcement, is designed to be protected in its own enclave and never sent anywhere. The latter would be far more obvious in the code and easier to spot.

> The latter would be far more obvious in the code and easier to spot.

But we can't see the code. And it's far from certain you'd be able to pick it up through watching data packages.

Have you ever used an ATM? Did you check that it didn't have embedded fingerprint readers in it?

Seems to work when I have my gloves on.

So does your iPhone's home button.

Yea but they explicitly say it has a fingerprint sensor.

Which seems like the more likely covert NSA spy device? The iPhone fingerprint sensor that Apple prominently mentioned in a product launch or the hidden ATM fingerprint sensor that your bank says isn't there?

It's probably where you least expect it, and you seem to be suggesting it's less expected in the iPhone ;).

The NSA has the ability to compromise the devices http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-...

good spy novel stuff... steal the prints of some foreign bigwig, or say Julian Assange, plant a copy in some compromising crime scene...

So toss a packet-sniffer between your phone and the backup servers. See if the iCloud backup has sufficiently more data inside than before.

Well, you can't trust _any_ device if that's your line of thinking. Not an iPhone, not an Ubuntu phone, no device whatsoever. Not unless you've baked your own chips, or made some contraption running your software in parallel on different CPU architectures.

If you're going to do anything, including working on the computer you're typing your comments on, you have to trust a lot of parties. Some of that trust involves knowing who made the code, and some of it may involve the knowledge that the NSA will not be using their best, most secret backdoors against a whole lot of people.

If you don't trust the iPhone not to steal your fingerprints then you probably shouldn't own an iPhone -- fingerprint reader or not. I mean, that's sort of obvious, no?

What phone should you own instead? It seems like the only choice if you want to real privacy is to stop using a phone at all, but that's obviously unrealistic for many people.

I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here, but if in fact the NSA required copies of all fingerprints, I doubt Apple would be allowed to publicize it.

But would they still go about implementing it? I mean, it sounds crazy from a business perspective.

What if the NSA told them they had to have access to the data, or else jail and whatnot.

Am I understanding this correctly? What if the NSA went to Apple and said you have to get us access to everyone's fingerprints or you'll go to jail and other stuff, so Apple put a fingerprint scanner on the iPhone? It seems like a stretch to me.

More of: - Apple releases the new finger print reader 5S - NSA: "Heyyy ... we'd like those." - Apple: ".... Crap." (or: "Sure!")

Much more likely: "Do it, or your datafeed of intel from industrial espionage will run dry."

Nor would they bother explicitly highlighting that it's kept local...

But that's exactly what they want you to think.

Makes me think of all these companies that your passwords are secure until one day, someone hacks their database and decrypts them. When confronted, the company says "But they were very secure, you should have mentioned that by 'secure' you meant "with one way encryption".

Honestly, to effectively market this technology in today's waters, they have to say that it's kept local.

If they send out 8 bytes of your fingerprint data hidden in every picture you take (so your fingerprint can be regenerated by looking at your first 500 pictures) I doubt anyone will ever find it.

Not publicizing it would massively backfire as soon as the first teardown happens.

>Apple specifically stated that your fingerprint is stored and encrypted only on the A7 chip, and Apple couldn't legally tell us anything different.

Don't trust the NSA, trust Apple instead because they have no interest in your private information.

Makes perfect sense.

Well as long as they specifically stated it! We can totally rely on their word.

As others have mentioned, I'm sure we'll learn much more when the jailbreaking begins. Just reporting the facts we have.

Oh OK. If Apple says so then that settles it.

So what?

How many webapps have encypted and stored their users password "only on their own servers", to later have them leaked via combination of exploit in 3rd party software that allowed the download of their DB and a little brute force?

Only difference on an iPhone is that there are literally 100s of thousand of apps that can possibly be exploited

I believe that pilif's issue is with potential undisclosed storage of the fingerprint data on Apple's servers.

What they didn't mention is that it's stored in the L2 cache ;-)

In this case, the L2 cache is part of the A7, so that would be fair. I would guess this means it's also only stored in NVRAM local to the SOC and not persisted to the general flash filesystem.

I would guess they just tacked a bog-standard TPM chip into their SoC design. Biometric (fingerprint) sensors and TPM chips go together; see any enterprise-targeted laptop from the last five years.

Quite. It'll be a little hardware black box that nobody can see into, one that just gives a 'yes' or 'no' answer.

Additionally -- if things are like they used to be when I was in the biometrics world in the mid-90s -- the fingerprint template will be small and work like a one way hash; if you have the template you cannot reconstruct the fingerprint from it. It wouldn't really be very useful to the NSA or anyone else.

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