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> I think they're missing the point. The passcode on an iPhone defends against other people in your environment - family members, coworkers, roommates - getting your information opportunistically. It doesn't defend against hackers, the government, or even slightly savvy thieves.

The Google Chrome Security team begs to differ [1]. According to them giving someone the illusion of security is bad.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165708

Which is an incredibly absurd position, in any context.

Security is not binary.

If it were, it would always be 0.

Which is ironic coming from a company known to be sharing information directly with the NSA.

Name one security technology that is 100% foolproof. They don't exist. So the point isn't to rely on one thing, but to rely on many things that, used in concert, increase the risk, complexity and cost associated with subverting the entire system--not its individual components.

I don't think I've seen anyone parry an appeal to authority with an ad hominem lately. Good one.

Umm... I think the point was to subvert the appeal to authority by pointing out that Google has been compromised.

The main argument is in the second paragraph.

Anyhow, thanks for noticing :)

In this case it's valid.

In the same way that you'd afford extra scrutiny to a government agent making claims about what encryption methods to use, you should afford the same scrutiny to companies making security claims who are documented collaborators with the TLAs.

An ad hominem isn't always a fallacy, especially when the credibility of the speaker is legitimately in question. Saying they're automatically wrong would be fallacious (not to mention silly), but questioning credibility based on actual, documented behavior is not.

Citing the Google Chrome Security team regarding security is the exact opposite of the appeal to authority fallacy. It's an appropriate expert for the context.

No. It's appeal to authority.

It is an appeal to authority, but a non fallacious one. As the authority being quoted has the relevant position.

Giving someone the illusion of security is bad because it displaces their understanding of security.

An understanding of security will reveal that security is not a binary state of affairs. It's perfectly reasonable to trust known-imperfect mechanisms like the iPhone fingerprint reader to keep honest people honest and discourage ordinary muggers and thieves. I don't need military-grade access control for my personal iPhone, I don't want the inconvenience that would necessarily accompany it, and I damned sure don't want to pay for it.

And the Google Chrome guy is correct in all respects: it's not reasonable to expect an application to provide security that's redundant with security provided by user accounts on the OS it runs on. It would be better to teach users to create separate accounts on their system, if they want to hide their local passwords from other members of their family.

Teaching users to create separate accounts might be better, but so would any number of impractical suggestions.

It is perfectly reasonable to expect an application to provide more security than the user account provides because in the real world, we know that people don't always lock their computers. Not all applications are risky, but one that centralizes a users credentials is clearly so.

Pretending otherwise is simply not acknowledging the real world.

You are completely detached from normal practical realities, as such your beliefs on security can be safely disregarded.

> It's one thing to leave fingerprints all around your environment, but there is now the potential to steal your biometrics over the internet.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the biometric data never leaves the device.

It's also not stored on the device. Hashes, not fingerprints, are stored.

You need the fingerprints themselves to fake out the hardware.

Rare is the phone without the owner's fingerprints stored all over it.

Sure, but his post was about stealing data "over the Internet". That's not possible.

All bets are off with physical access to the hardware, of course.

Nobody has been able to use those low quality fingerprints to defeat TouchID.

I wouldn't count on that. See https://twitter.com/dotMudge/status/381900643415240704

That picture shows a carefully polished phone into which someone has meticulously placed 5 careful fingerprints - as if they were being taken at a police station, nothing like the fingerprints you get in normal use.

Not true at all. There are quite a large number of cases out there that would be hard to lift fingerprints from. If the owner has this sort of case, and if the owner has cleaned the screen recently or just had the phone pocketed, thus wiping the screen off rather well...I think there are a large number of phones from which you would get no prints.

Well, they have to store fuzzy hashes rather than cryptographically secure ones since they're going to get a different section of the finger and slightly different features within that finger each time. There's a good chance that whatever form of fuzzy hashing they're using is reversible in the sense that, given a hash, you can create a fingerprint that isn't necessarily exactly the same as the original but will match that hash.

For example, the obvious approach is to store fingerprint features, which will be then matched by any print that has the same features in the same positions. If you do a good enough job of generating the new print you might even be able to fool police investigations, since they compare prints the same way.

Looks like fingerprints have 30-40ish bits of entropy depending on how forgiving the device is, so unless they're doing some key stretching it should be practical to produce an image of a similar fingerprint by brute-forcing the hash with every biologically likely fingerprint.

http://lukenotricks.blogspot.com/2009/04/on-entropy-of-finge...

I think it's a hot topic in security circles right now that a worm or virus could infect these mobile devices and "phone home" with the data, resulting in a media nightmare.

You are overcomplicatimg things. The hypothetical cop could just smash your phone to pieces. Same result, less effort.

Not the same result at all. You now have lost your phone and the cop has to argue that you smashed it yourself out of spite. There may be more witnesses or evidence after smashing a phone. Presumably there are even phone company records showing when and where a device went dead.

I am not a lawyer but it seems to me, 9 times out 10, the cop would prefer a cleaner result - they confiscate your device, and oops, when you get it back, the video is gone.

Why wouldn't they just confiscate it, and "oops, it fell in a bucket of water"?

If cops wanted clean results, they wouldn't do anything that looks bad on your smartphone camera to begin with.

The first round of sleephack data exposures will put the failure to that point.

that's actually kind of ironic...

...the people closest to you in your environment ( kids, parents, spouse, boss, co-workers) are the ones who can most easily obtain your fingerprints...

And are probably least easily able to capture a high resolution image and reproduce a 2400 dpi heavy-ink image that is then used to create mould of your print.