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Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

developer.apple.com

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Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#2

Post by theboat »

If the web migrates to biometric sensors for authentication, I hope this won't suffer from vendor lock-in. When every new device ships with facial recognition and/or a fingerprint reader, it will be nice to login using my face/fingerprint irrespective of the device I'm on.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#4

Post by cgb223 »

theboat wrote: post #2

If the web migrates to biometric sensors for authentication, I hope this won't suffer from vendor lock-in. When every new device ships with facial recognition and/or a fingerprint reader, it will be nice to login using my face/fingerprint irrespective of the device I'm on.

We’d need to have a standard HTML element like or something and let the browser handle mapping it to whatever specific hardware the device is using

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#5

Post by Spivak »

theboat wrote: post #2

If the web migrates to biometric sensors for authentication, I hope this won't suffer from vendor lock-in. When every new device ships with facial recognition and/or a fingerprint reader, it will be nice to login using my face/fingerprint irrespective of the device I'm on.

I don't see how this could ever be something not vendor-specific because without this being tied to "Log in with Apple" you're just saying "trust the client."

Maybe that's fine if all you want is to "lock" a sensitive page to people who aren't the device owner but that's pretty limited compared to FaceID to actually log in.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#6

Post by jedieaston »

theogravity wrote: post #3

I wonder what part of the Web Auth APIs does iOS Safari support since MDN says most of the APIs are not supported. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authent...

I think that this is coming in the next release of Safari, so MDN is correct, it's not currently supported.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#7

Post by lifeisstillgood »

So roughly speaking this is WebAuthn for a web site, with the iphone acting as the dongle.

It's a really good idea. I can see there being a big demand for just simplifying signin - I can easily see a time where it is worth not having the hassle of managing multiple signin processes and just choosing webauth or nothing.

Edit: to be clear this won't affect B2C sites whose monetisation is based on getting as many people as possible. But imagine a saas business charging upwards of 100 bucks a month - they have something valuable to protect, and the security story just got a lot easier

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#8

Post by rovr138 »

cgb223 wrote: post #4
theboat wrote: post #2

If the web migrates to biometric sensors for authentication, I hope this won't suffer from vendor lock-in. When every new device ships with facial recognition and/or a fingerprint reader, it will be nice to login using my face/fingerprint irrespective of the device I'm on.

We’d need to have a standard HTML element like or something and let the browser handle mapping it to whatever specific hardware the device is using

The issue is that it's just a token that would simply say Passed/Fail. So it's trusting the client/browser.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#9

Post by _jal »

Going to have to give serious thought to where I will and won't use this.

There are a lot of implications - no ability to automate and giving others data on you were provably in front of some machine are two big ones.

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