When I pass away my daughter will get an envelope with all my passwords. I would still like her to be able to open all my accounts.
Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#12Biometrics aren't secrets and cannot replace passwords but they can compliment them perhaps. For instance, I can think of identical twins who don't want the other to see their private photos etc...
They also should complement them so that the combination remains revokable. Using a biometric marker standalone is dangerous if that marker is somehow compromised.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#13Biometrics aren't secrets and cannot replace passwords but they can compliment them perhaps. For instance, I can think of identical twins who don't want the other to see their private photos etc...
They also should complement them so that the combination remains revokable. Using a biometric marker standalone is dangerous if that marker is somehow compromised.
Indeed.
What scares me is the idea of a cop at a random checkpoint forcing your finger onto your iPhone against your will to gain access to its contents.
A password is so much better in such a scenario.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also should complement them so that the combination remains revokable. Using a biometric marker standalone is dangerous if that marker is somehow compromised.
Indeed. What scares me is the idea of a cop at a random checkpoint forcing your finger onto your iPhone against your will to gain access to its contents. A password is so much better in such a scenario.
In some jurisdictions they can force you to give that up, too. Or hold you in jail until you do. UK comes to mind.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#15> last month, it was discovered that even passwords as long as 55 characters could be broken.
I stopped reading there. This is utter bullshit.
If 55 is doable, then 16 should be peanuts (like, many orders of magnitude easier). Here crack this md5 hash for me: 2419219bcd13f7a6dfebeca7cf94108e. We all know md5 is broken, right? By the way, this was generated by using:
head -c 16 /dev/urandom | md5sum
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#16Biometrics aren't secrets and cannot replace passwords but they can compliment them perhaps. For instance, I can think of identical twins who don't want the other to see their private photos etc...
Monozygote twins have in fact different fingerprints. I am not 100% sure about vascular network, but I think it is also different.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#17Biometrics aren't secrets and cannot replace passwords but they can compliment them perhaps. For instance, I can think of identical twins who don't want the other to see their private photos etc...
Not only are biometrics not secrets, they're also not changeable.
They are essentially only a tool to allow someone else to be certain of a person's identity given that person's physical presence. You'll basically always need someone at a biometric station making sure the rules of are followed - there were some Brazilian doctors who got caught using plastic fingers to sign in and out from a finger-print time clock system, for example.
They are indeed very different from passwords.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#18In my opinion there are 2 main issues with Biometrics:
- The first is that it may identify you with precision but it can not tell your will, so basically, you can force someone to use the sensor.
- The second issue is that it does not allow you to give authorization to a third party in exceptional situations.
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#19Another way to identify users is by the speed and rhythm they type their username and password. For example, let's think about a hypothetical company that sells a per-seat license to a database, that wants to determine if multiple people are using a license for a single seat without false positives. The easiest case to detect are multiple concurrent logins from different IPs. However, if the service/database is used…
See also: DARPA's Active Authentication program (http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Active_Authentica...).
Re: Beyond passwords: New tools to identify humans
#20In my opinion there are 2 main issues with Biometrics: - The first is that it may identify you with precision but it can not tell your will, so basically, you can force someone to use the sensor. - The second issue is that it does not allow you to give authorization to a third party in exceptional situations.
and third: You can't change whatever attribute of yours is being measured when the data leaks out by accident. And fourth: You always share the same attribute with every service identifying you.
We've already seen password databases being compromised. If that happens, you change your password and move on. If biometric data leaks out, you a) can't change your attribute and b) you will have shared that attribute with other parties.
Biometric data is WAY worse than passwords.