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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

> Its pretty well known that fingerprints _by themselves_ are a pretty poor replacement for passwords. (a) They're public, in that it's pretty easy to get someone's fingerprint... just find something they touched recently. (b) If they're compromised its impossible to change them.

I'm a bit more worried about Russian ransomware operators getting my passwords than my fingerprint.

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Hope you never have a picture posted online with your fingers in view, then.

Biometrics are terrible security tokens.

they might, but likely not with a resolution good enough to allow then to actually extract an useful fingerprint.. specially not after social media resize and convert the image a thousand times.

also, fingerprint is not the only security, you still need physical access to the yubikey to use it, something a russian hacker also will have a hard time having..

how does a Russian hacker having a picture of my fingerprint allow them to use my Yubikey to unlock my account?

Similarly you could say iPhones with Touch ID are terrible because phones are full of fingerprints. Yet it turns out people who want to crack them attack the pincodes or the general security of the device, not the fingerprints.

If the police/border protection/etc ever took your fingerprints, don't worry, they'll get to them too. Maybe with even less effort than would be required for your password, depending on how diligently you protect your passwords.

even if they chop off your hand?

If Russian ransomware operators want to even attempt to chop off my hand I would need to start making much more interesting life choices that I have been.

Time to add an embedded EKG as another factor :)

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