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Comment by drdeadringer | Hacker News Reader

> Am I the only one who doesn’t want a future without passwords?

As much of a Science Fiction fan I am with "iris logins" and similar, I am also a retro-futurist who appreciates things like punch-number security for secured doors.

I mislike this current 2FA path of security for several reasons, the least of which is what if the email never comes or I don't have a cell phone (let alone a smartphone)? I'm screwed.

Passwords, passcodes, number pads ... seems to be quite more Human than all of this "prove yourself in the name of security theatre" these days.

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I've gone completely off biometric security.

It's unchangeable and externally facing. The only truly secure enclave is the things in my head, and they have the benefit of being changeable if compromised, and I can make a positive distinction of value if under duress.

As you should. They are amputationware.

[Snark warning!]

"We were compromised. Rotate your passwords, chop off your finger and change your face."

[End snark]

Biometric measurements are fuzzy, by their nature. This in turn means that for every stored biometric identifier, there is a whole range of inputs / input signals that will match. On top of that, the measurement devices are on untrusted systems.

If you can compromise the device and extract the signal sent from the sensor, you should have a near universal replay payload. Right now that is still an espionage realm threat, but as these methods become more universal, mass attacks against large populations become more and more appealing.

Archives of valid (username, password) tuples are already sold on underground markets. It's not much of a stretch to predict that (username, biometric sensor dump) archives will eventually become a commodity too.

>If you can compromise the device and extract the signal sent from the sensor, you should have a near universal replay payload. Right now that is still an espionage realm threat, but as these methods become more universal, mass attacks against large populations become more and more appealing.

If the manufacturers had a sense of security, they would make the sensor into a hard-wired device that takes an auxiliary value as input and combines the input with a fuzzy extractor to provide a unique key per auxiliary value in such a way that neither the value nor the biometric can be extracted from the key.

But I'm not holding my breath!

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