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Comment by dm8 | Hacker News Reader

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dm8·

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.

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"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....

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

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