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Comment by trzaska | Hacker News Reader

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trzaska·

Seriously? Pattern locks are almost as easy as Face Unlock to get through.

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Are you referring to smudge attacks on pattern locks?

Face unlock was even weaker since anyone who had access to your photo could unlock it.

Yeah I was referring to that, but I just realized that there's probably some legal bs preventing them from doing it. So nevermind!

"Face unlock was even weaker since anyone who had access to your photo could unlock it"

I thought that rumour was debunked by Google engineers within the first hour that it launched?

edit - The quote is "Responding to a Twitter message from someone who say Face Unlock could be hacked [with a picture of the person], Bray said, "Nope. Give us some credit.""

I was following that when it was launched. But it was still easily defeated. Here's TheNextWeb article where they show a video on how easy it is to break that: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/11/11/android-4-0-face-unl...

how would they make it photo proof ? I mean any guesses on the algorithm they use.. my dart in the dark would be that a photo would be absolutely still while a real person's face might twitch, shake, bat eyelids etc..

Maybe they do something really clever and rely on faces being 3D and the phone not being held 100% still?

In the interest of adding context, a "Smudge Attack" paper was presented at USENIX 2010 (Aviv et al. 2010), linking it for those interested. I only read security papers as a layman but I did enjoy this one.

Paper link:

http://static.usenix.org/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/Aviv....

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