I don't disagree with you (hence the upvote) but let's put this into context: what are we worried about here? My fingerprints are easily obtainable by a determi

I don't disagree with you (hence the upvote) but let's put this into context: what are we worried about here? My fingerprints are easily obtainable by a determined attacker. No question at all; I leave a trail of them around me everywhere I go. What you mentioned being worried about is mass mining of fingerprints–that hashes are being uploaded to some big database. The design of the system is to prevent that. We'd know if Apple were wholesale uploading fingerprints to its servers. There is no way that someone would not have noticed that happening. Note that the secure enclave is a separate co-processor with its own memory. It's secure even if the entire OS kernel is compromised. > Each Secure Enclave is provisioned during fabrication with its own UID (Unique ID) 
that is not accessible to other parts of the system and is not known to Apple. [my emphasis] When the device starts up, an ephemeral key is created, entangled with its UID, and used to encrypt the Secure Enclave’s portion of the device’s memory space. Additionally, data that is saved to the file system by the Secure Enclave is encrypted with a key entangled with the UID and an anti-replay counter. Note that for the 'rogue engineer' attack, you have to assume that other people at Apple are either colluding with this person or incompetent. Which is not impossible, but it's a little more than just blind faith. Note that the secure enclave has existed for over two years now, since the A7 chip was introduced, and we're yet to see an attack, and I'm sure it's not for lack of trying. If there's a backdoor they're hiding it well, and what would they get out of it anyway? The white paper is here if you're interested: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf