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Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

I really like the solution that includes the iOS background — the os password dialogues should adopt this approach immediately. Zoom out to a view that includes springboard and your background image, and maybe include a preview of the app in a little window that the user can tap to return to the app rather than a non-contextual “cancel” button if the password prompt is related to the app context for some reason.

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I've seen this at banks that do something similar (and it's probably for this reason). They include a user-selected picture at logon, so if you see the wrong picture, you know that their logon page is being spoofed.

I have no idea of the feasibility of locking down some piece of user data such that the OS can display it for privileged access, but random apps cannot, but this seems like a reasonable solution. Include some user selected word or picture in the title bar of the settings dialog so that users know its the real one.

Those pictures can easily be proxies by a spoofer, so I don't see the point of them.

Those pictures are indeed useless when used by banks, since they do nothing against MITM. But for the attack described in the OP they would actually be a reasonable defense, since this sort of indiscriminate low-privilege phishing can't intercept requests between the user and the system in order to determine the secret image.

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