4 ms·

Biometrics work (in their limited way) only if you control the hardware and the physical environment. You can measure something unique and check that it's as ex

Biometrics work (in their limited way) only if you control the hardware and the physical environment. You can measure something unique and check that it's as expected, but that's only valid if there's proper custody on the measurement and resulting data. It's a pretty simple concept, but people perennially can't figure it out. Or don't care. So, if you're going to use biometrics, a retina scan on a bank vault might be reasonable, but a web site that does facial recognition with the user's camera is not.

3np 4y ago
In principle, your are correct and one should act accordingly. In practice, it's an arms race. Plug some more sensors and hardware enclave on the next smartphone generation and flame up the zero-trust hype and it'll be a while until you can covertly unlock your spouse's phone or steal your flatmates custodied crypto even as a well-funded hacker. The colletaral damage of individual autonomy as end-user devices, apps, and services are dragged along and slowly becoming the only gateways into the financial system and large parts of the private and public social room is rather quite unfortunate.
- adrianmonk 4y ago
  Well, now you get into DRM and its kin. Which is really a conflict of values. If party A (the owner/user) has control of the hardware, there are certain things it enables, like doing what you want with the hardware you paid for. If party B (the vendor/manufacturer) has control of the hardware, it enables other things like participating in games with stronger anti-cheat mechanisms or quicker authentication when doing a payment. Some of these things have value to only one party, and some of them might have value to both. You're never going to make everybody happy when values conflict. Plus it gets extra complicated because values vary. Maybe one end user cares less about control and more about convenience, and another end user is the opposite.
justin_oaks 4y ago
Yup. Remote biometrics? Forget about it. Another big problem with biometrics is that if they're "stolen" then you can't revoke them. That said, if you control the hardware and physical environment where the biometrics are used then it's hard to use the stolen biometrics. I could see a case for going to an office that was approved by the government to verify your biometrics. That way the hardware and physical environment would be controlled. The office could have people verifying that you don't, for example, have fake fingerprints over your real ones. Then that office could act like a certificate authority and generate a certificate that links your identity to a newly generated public key. Then all authentication would be done using the private key and certificate instead of using the biometrics directly. In such a case, stolen biometric data wouldn't be useful since it'd be hard to get past physical inspection.

3np 4y ago

In principle, your are correct and one should act accordingly. In practice, it's an arms race. Plug some more sensors and hardware enclave on the next smartphone generation and flame up the zero-trust hype and it'll be a while until you can covertly unlock your spouse's phone or steal your flatmates custodied crypto even as a well-funded hacker. The colletaral damage of individual autonomy as end-user devices, apps, and services are dragged along and slowly becoming the only gateways into the financial system and large parts of the private and public social room is rather quite unfortunate.

adrianmonk 4y ago
Well, now you get into DRM and its kin. Which is really a conflict of values. If party A (the owner/user) has control of the hardware, there are certain things it enables, like doing what you want with the hardware you paid for. If party B (the vendor/manufacturer) has control of the hardware, it enables other things like participating in games with stronger anti-cheat mechanisms or quicker authentication when doing a payment. Some of these things have value to only one party, and some of them might have value to both. You're never going to make everybody happy when values conflict. Plus it gets extra complicated because values vary. Maybe one end user cares less about control and more about convenience, and another end user is the opposite.

justin_oaks 4y ago

Yup. Remote biometrics? Forget about it. Another big problem with biometrics is that if they're "stolen" then you can't revoke them. That said, if you control the hardware and physical environment where the biometrics are used then it's hard to use the stolen biometrics. I could see a case for going to an office that was approved by the government to verify your biometrics. That way the hardware and physical environment would be controlled. The office could have people verifying that you don't, for example, have fake fingerprints over your real ones. Then that office could act like a certificate authority and generate a certificate that links your identity to a newly generated public key. Then all authentication would be done using the private key and certificate instead of using the biometrics directly. In such a case, stolen biometric data wouldn't be useful since it'd be hard to get past physical inspection.