Apple Offers Additional Details on Touch ID, iPhone 5s Won't Store Fingerprint Images

[atteligibility]

Time is money...simple as that.

Got to love people that say that... haha
Well, you might want to review again the definition of opportunity cost, time saved is money as long as that time could have been used to make extra money. Time saved unlocking your phone while your sitting on the toilet won't make you much really...

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of the fingerprint sensor, as this is much more user friendly than the password and more secure than no password.
But, using the money saving argument... this is silly now...

I love back of the envelope problems like these, but you missed a lot of points:
- confusing "time is money" with opportunity cost
- Time to register fingerprints
- Time to unlock the phone when your fingers are moist for example, which is a known issue already
- Time to reboot your phone to use a password if there is a problem with the fingerprint recognition
- Time lost having to unlock your phone hundreds of times to show off the technology to friends and family
- Time to go to the genius bar to exchange your phone as early models will probably have a significant percentage of faulty products
- cost of the phone itself, vs buying a 5 or 5C
- ...

So let's just agree, that thing is going to be cool and bring a lot more security to people like me that would not use a password, as I hate to type on the small keyboard.
Again, the money saving aspect is silly, so silly that even Apple didn't use it in their marketing material..

 

[9947273]

They won't release an SDK, it says quite clearly in the video that other apps won't be allowed access to the fingerprint. Thanks a lot NSA

 

[theOtherGeoff]

If I'm understanding crypto properly, if Apple have used your fingerprint to generate a salted and hashed version of your finger print using a decent number of cycles of a widely recognised and secured hashing algorithm, then surely without the salt, it's pretty damn hard to reverse engineer the passcode - hashing algorithms being one way and all

You understand correctly.
And even with the salt, I'll be surprised they get anything more than the hash of the fingerprint...

The curious thing is that this has to have a fuzzy math component, that needs a set of 3D registrations points with some tolerances. That... is your fingerprint. I don't think you can 'compare hashes' at that level. At some point, there has to be an unencrypted set of your fingerprint registration points, the X/Y/Z tolerances (all that wiggling during registration). That I'm assuming is encrypted and not hashed in the A7 chip, and the device can decrypt it, feed it to the compare engine (special circuitry, a GPU or CPU program?) and effectively do a 'recognition' match [take the received set of data off the button, start trying to 'orient it' to your stored data, rotating it 360 on the X axis, 5 or 10 deg on the YZ axis (pitch/yaw), and up or down a couple tenths of a millimeter on the Z axis, see if in tolerances [match] and if not iterate). And my guess is there is likely a couple 1D and 2D data vectors that help quickly orientate to the general XY XZ and YZ planes

Once that is done, it's either a match or not, and if a match, then I would guess it spits out a hashed token [verified identifier] as described above for sharing to any system that wants to ensure that it truly is the same person and device making the access request.

 

[theOtherGeoff]

I think many people misunderstand the danger here. I don't really care if anyone knows what my fingerprint looks like. I have no criminal history, a boring life, don't even really drink alcohol or do anything risky, don't have any problems that would cause me to fail getting even a top secret clearance, (unless I am close friends with some hard core lawbreaker a la Walter White that I don't even know about his/her actions). It's not about whether my fingerprint is known to someone, or if it is sitting on a guvmint shelf somewhere.

It's all about the ability to track someone's movements, thoughts (through email/text/posting) and daily routine. The problem with the fingerprint is simply that it is a biometric item that ties everything to one unique person. It is the digital equivalent of having a private detective follow me everywhere I go, having stealth gear that allows him to hear every detail of every conversation that I make, and seeing everything and everywhere I visit. Would anything compromising or embarassing come out of that? For me rarely to never. But it's creepy as hell.

And there is the possibility for so much misconception when someone who doesn't know you tries to categorize or interpret your actions. There was recently a story of a woman who tried to join an army secretary typist pool. She was denied because she had an FBI file categorizing her as a right wing extremist because of a paper she had written in school at her professor's direction. It turns out that she was a life long liberal and the file was completely wrong in its assessment (not that she was a threat either way!)

Honestly, the oddest thing to me about people blindly supporting a police state is that America is a fairly safe country to live in. Sure, the murder rates are far higher than any other developed nation, but there is no threat out there that the NSA stuff really protects us from. We have safe borders with our neighbors, two huge oceans, and a lack of true dictionary terrorism (the word is misused grossly in the media and public). If I was living somewhere like Israel, I might want a police state spying on everyone, but here it just seems silly. No one I know remotely has been affected by random acts of sabotage or violence. Threats to me are much more along the lines of food, health, and finance.

Excellent off the point diatribe about something unrelated to a fingerprint hash. Nice straw man attack.

I strongly agree with you but you totally went off the rails in trying to prove how a fingerprint hash would 'track you' any more than the phone that you already own... make calls to and from, do web accesses to and from, and tracks geographical movements, even stores pictures with facial recognition, and date and locations stamp on them, heck it even stores voice memos of me. Any reasonable analytics program and an SSL brute forcing tool could narrow down everything to a point of identifying ME... More accurately than a fingerprint.

The hash adds nothing to that. Why would the NSA even care about a set of numbers to likely the only user (or 3) of a phone when all that other information is on the phone, or going to or coming from the phone.

AND you make no mention of how many other fingerprint devices exist out there already (I've worked for 10 years where my fingerprint was my password into my place of work... and my banks all require a thumbprint for verification of my signature). How much of a delta in personal information loss risk is there.

I think you misunderstand and misrepresent how little this additional information helps.

 

[BC2009]

Really wish you would have kept it simple. I didn't even get past the second sentence.

sorry... cryptographic hashes are like "checksums" if you are familiar with those.

 

[theOtherGeoff]

...do you mean we should TRUST Apple with all our information because they assure our safety and privacy???

-the same way that all our data has been handed over so easily to government without our consent?

-the same way (allegedly) Gov can access data on our iphones??

So now we should trust a phone maker with our biometric data??????


I Love my iphones but if there is no way they can assure me that my fingerprint is not stored by default there is no way il buy another iphone...

everyone should do the same thing and send a clear message to Apple

So... if you don't trust a corporation, then don't use their product.

You trust your internet provider.... do you have proof this is validated?
You trust your email provider... do you have proof this is validated?
You trust your bank... ditto

So... If you don't have proof, why are using a bank, on the internet, or using email? You should be living under a rock. trading acorns for food, and communicating using codes and carrier pigeons.

Send a clear message to all of those and exit the current society.

Oh... they're different? in what way.

Banks are REQUIRED (if they want to remain a bank) to review all your money transfers and report suspicious activity to the gov't

EMAIL providers are being asked to turn over information globally without warrant in the US and in the EU

Your Internet provider (or their provider) has a Room where all wires go in and out for all their Border routing, plus one more wire that is property of the US Govt.

Sheesh. People are so inconsistent with their 'convictions'.

 

[nascimento]

No thanks.

Also, if you have to actively launch Touch ID & train it for 30 seconds per fingerprint... how in the hell would it store your fingerprint "by default" unbeknownst to you, pray tell?

Can Apple prove it does not?

Thats what you should be asking

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So... if you don't trust a corporation, then don't use their product.

You trust your internet provider.... do you have proof this is validated?
You trust your email provider... do you have proof this is validated?
You trust your bank... ditto

So... If you don't have proof, why are using a bank, on the internet, or using email? You should be living under a rock. trading acorns for food, and communicating using codes and carrier pigeons.

Send a clear message to all of those and exit the current society.

Oh... they're different? in what way.

Banks are REQUIRED (if they want to remain a bank) to review all your money transfers and report suspicious activity to the gov't

EMAIL providers are being asked to turn over information globally without warrant in the US and in the EU

Your Internet provider (or their provider) has a Room where all wires go in and out for all their Border routing, plus one more wire that is property of the US Govt.

Sheesh. People are so inconsistent with their 'convictions'.

The thing is...

I shouldn't have to be questioning any of this if there were enough checks and balances (or if they were working as they should be) and if, in the light of what has been coming out, we have to question these corporations as to how they treat our data/info then we should be doing just that.

 

[togg]

Hmmmm.....

Thanks for this. I needed to read something different from usual propaganda.

Maybe fingerprint are not accessible now. But I completely don't trust Apple (or any other corporations), they will team-up with capitalist government when they will be required to do so.

 

[eugarps]

The security's great but...

How do you sell it?

 

[togg]

I don't get why people get so uptight about NSA. It's there to protect you. If you aren't doing anything wrong then they have no reason to snoop on your data. Simple.

Be a good consumer! Unless you want to fight capitalism everything will be just fine!

 

[Mr Bigs]

Sorry, but I don't trust Apple in this matter. (The fingerprint could still be sent to a big database of fingerprints along with user data/name at the NSA.) We know Obama, Washington and obvisouly the big corporations lie constantly to us, from everything about survaillance, false flag operations (yes, research the historic facts), disinformation (Syria, so-called secret information about Assad that isn't proper proof even though it's presented as such), to lies of omissions, and all this through a lapdog mainstream media run by Washington and big corporations. Why should I trust Apple in this? This could be just another lie.

Take a look at the broad, independent 9/11 investigation these days in the USA with hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists and specialists. They are finding one lie after another in the official story, and many very disturbing FACTS. Is this covered by the mainstream media? Of course, not..that would upset the corrupt power elite.
Sorry, at this point I have no faith in Apple's word. I'm not buying this phone based on principle. Damn it, we need principles! Not using/buying the products is the best consumer leverage. Now is the time to stand up against the 1984 society we now see unfolding in/from the USA. It might be too late a few years down the road....

I agree the full truth is not being disclosed,the iPhone is out and I hope the don't put this sensor on the new iPad.

 

[AaronEdwards]

They won't release an SDK, it says quite clearly in the video that other apps won't be allowed access to the fingerprint. Thanks a lot NSA

You actually think that Apple would have given other apps the right to access to the fingerprint sensor if it wasn't for the NSA? Fingerprint data is just the kind of information that Apple has refused to let other apps access before.

That decision has nothing to do with the NSA, and it's a wise decision.

 

[vpro]

Fascinating - someone please explain to me how, if they do not store the id on cloud and in their databases, is the touch id able to sign in and pay each and every time? Like a keyhole, you put your key into it and only your key can open the lock, how can someone not come along and make a copy of the keyhole, because it's there, or is it encrypted on cloud networks etc? They have to store something for you to access it with your touch id and password right? How does it really work I need to know! It is so interesting and frightening too!

 

[mdelvecchio]

Saving ~4 seconds between slide to unlock and passcode is roughly ~200 seconds per day saved unlocking my phone or ~3 minutes. 3 minutes per day equates to roughly ~18 hours per year or more than $5,000 worth of lost productivity unlocking my phone.

That alone makes this touch sensor worth while.

steve jobs on shaving only 10 seconds off boot time on the mac -- it saves lives.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

 

[topper24hours]

Can Apple prove it does not?

Thats what you should be asking

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The thing is...

I shouldn't have to be questioning any of this if there were enough checks and balances (or if they were working as they should be) and if, in the light of what has been coming out, we have to question these corporations as to how they treat our data/info then we should be doing just that.

Does Apple SECRETLY train my fingerprints, even if I never launch Touch ID? No. No, that's not what I "need to be asking". That seems so absurd & paranoid to me. Apple is NOT the NSA... Even if that was technologically feasible.. all you tin foil hat armchair conspiracy theorists believe that it's the NSA that so desperately want a fingerprint of yours, NOT Apple... why would they (Apple) even do this??? If they did (once again, as I understand the technology... not even possible).. if it came out, they'd lose customers en masse. Apple is in the business of keeping customers, not scaring them away. Would secretly sneaking your fingerprint make Apple more money by you buying more phones? No. Would it make you purchase more apps? No. Would it make you buy more songs? No. Then why would Apple do this? Unless your theories extend to believing that Apple is offered SUCH a lucrative amount of money by the NSA per user to sneakily steal their fingerprint, that it would completely offset their theoretical losses of costumers & amount sued if it ever came out that they directly lied about every single detail of how the tech works (30 seconds to train, only stored on chip, only trained when you launch app, etc.) this makes ZERO logical sense, business sense, or sense of any other kind. Try some rational thought.

 

[mdelvecchio]

Dear Apple, I'm sorry because I realise it's not really your fault, but I don't trust that the NSA haven't nobbled you, and nothing you have said so far leads me to… um think different, as it were.

ignorance is bliss.

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The NSA will still have everyone's fingerprints

not from the apple, they wont. 1) it doesnt store prints, only hashes of numerical representations of prints. 2) its not transmitted from the device.

the NSA would need possession of your phone, and even then theyd only have the hashes, not the prints.

its the same way Amazon doesnt have your password, only a hash of your password.

 

[Jonesy135]

I could not agree more. Some people seem very excited about the NSA. They think that a) They are as important as the NSA to care about them. b) They don't realise they already have our fingerprints. c) Not sure what the NSA would do with our fingerprint.

Im Spanish myself. Our government has our fingerprints since the day we got our passport and ID card. As far as im concerned, its the same situation in most countries in the EU and possibly also America. So i don't get all this fuzz.

Im in the UK but i didnt need to scan my finger print for my passport... think i just have some facial recognition thing so i guess it depends where in the EU people are.... saying that, i wouldnt hesitate to give them my finger print if it sped up customs!!

The sensor is capacitive touch. A severed thumb almost certainly will not activate it properly.

sorry i should have used the [Facetious][/facetious] script...

 

[mdelvecchio]

It's not called paranoid anymore.

This reply from an Apple spokesperson makes me more nervous, actually, because of its misdirection.
The distinction between a fingerprint and name correlation versus a "fingerprint data" and name correlation seems artificial.

If I get a phone that has this (likely) i will never turn this feature on.

you are paranoid, and it is unwarranted in this case. apple isnt a g-man. they have said in the past they store as little as possible so they dont have to hand it over if ordered. this is one perfect example of that.

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Entering four digit pin takes about a second (and works 100% accurately). That's probably about on par with the sensor when sensor matches your fingerprint quickly. Since the sensor will not be able to match the fingerprint quickly all the time, in some cases it will take longer. On average sensor will probably cost you money.

youre conveniently overlooking: 1) hitting the home button to wake it, and 2) sliding to unlock. also, inputting the PIN is *not* 100%...i screw it up all the time due to wake lag.

and if someone is near you they can see your PIN.

so if you use a more secure alpha-numeric, which lots of people do, it takes way longer.

 

[topper24hours]

Fascinating - someone please explain to me how, if they do not store the id on cloud and in their databases, is the touch id able to sign in and pay each and every time? Like a keyhole, you put your key into it and only your key can open the lock, how can someone not come along and make a copy of the keyhole, because it's there, or is it encrypted on cloud networks etc? They have to store something for you to access it with your touch id and password right? How does it really work I need to know! It is so interesting and frightening too!

The keyhole analogy is not apt, in this case. With a traditional key/keyhole, the hole matches the key... thus, a locksmith can create a key from the keyhole.
However, every touch sensor is EXACTLY the same. It's a little circle on your phone.. nothing there to create a "key" from. Apple has stated that the "keyhole" exists only in a protected part of the processor.. briefly accessible ONLY by Touch ID just, as you touch the screen, to compare to your "key". Match or no match, the "keyhole" is then secured away again. This leaves little to no opportunity for a "locksmith" (read: hacker) to attempt to build said "key", as when it is briefly accessed, it is through the heavily encrypted Touch ID app, from the secure location in volatile memory.

 

[Shin3r]

Please cite every claim here. None of this has ever happened.

Why? So you can be lazy about it. I just looked it up also and found multiple news agencies that reported this. I haven't found the one that says the whole story was fake yet though.

 

[Tech198]

the NSA would need possession of your phone, and even then they'd only have the hashes, not the prints..

One-way hash?

 

[MacintoshMan]

Great, now my girlfriend can just unlock my phone for me in my sleep.

 

[ani4ani]

So you make over half a million dollars a year? Roughly $575,00?!?!

not bad for what appears to be messing around on his phone all day?

 

[mdelvecchio]

We'll see about the faster part. The scanner does not add any security because you will still has the pin. If anything, having two ways to unlock the device creates more options for hacking (compared with he single option).

incorrect. read up on two-factor authentication...the tenants of which are: choose two of these three: 1) something you know. 2) something you have. 3) something you are. requiring two of these is much more secure than only one.

you cant argue you way around it, its a security best practice.

http://tidbits.com/article/14089

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This has always been my opinion as well. I'd genuinely be interested to hear this position be proven wrong, because as far as I can tell, it can't be.

I'm happy for intelligence services to snoop on me, my phone calls and my emails, I'm not involved in anything seedy and as long as it helps keep terrorists or other aggressors away from the people I care about, they can carry on.

Granted, you could preach privacy laws and all, but try using the "but it's wrong to spy" argument on a psychopath bent on the destruction and death of millions of people. Ain't gonna fly.

terrorism is a bogus strawman. violent deaths due to terrorism are statistically rare...very rare. you are far more likely to die due to automobile or depression related incidents than brown men from the middleeast. its a shame to gain power.

the FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr, blackmailed him, and tried to compel him to kill himself. he had done no wrong. thats the same government youre claiming would do no wrong w/ spying powers. they have and its been proven:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/

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No one knows all technical possibilities, not even you.

we do. you need access to the device. verifying that it doesnt call home can easily be verified in a control room...

 

[Appleusergerman]

wrong approach!

Again: the problem is *NOT* that the NSA gets your fingerprints!!!!

In my case, getting a passport means that they take my fingerprint. Next thing: the German government sends it to the NSA. So this is not the point!

The point is:

WHATEVER you do with your 5s will be associated with your fingerprint and will therefore be attached to your file at the NSA!!! The fingerprint thingy makes it so much easier for the NSA to ident the data. Same time: i bet: this fingerprint thing will be and can be used against YOU in court. No more exuses! IT WAS YOU who did whatever was done!

And: everybody that ever used the Internet has such a file - you can be certain of it!

What we learned: what CAN BE DONE WILL BE DONE.

People: READ FORGEIGN NEWSPAPERS OR SITES AND INFORM YOURSELF! Most guys here have NO IDEA what is going on!