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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 14 2017, @04:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the steal-your-face dept.

Wired is running a story of hackers claiming to have broken Face ID on the new iPhone X.

When Apple released the iPhone X on November 3, it touched off an immediate race among hackers around the world to be the first to fool the company's futuristic new form of authentication. A week later, hackers on the actual other side of the world claim to have successfully duplicated someone's face to unlock his iPhone X—with what looks like a simpler technique than some security researchers believed possible.

On Friday, Vietnamese security firm Bkav released a blog post and video showing that—by all appearances—they'd cracked Face ID with a composite mask of 3-D-printed plastic, silicone, makeup, and simple paper cutouts, which in combination tricked an iPhone X into unlocking.

On a similar note Apple has repeatedly fought working with governments to unlock phones, if the police have a dead or detained criminal what is to stop them from just pointing the phone at their face and getting all the juicy data bits inside? Does Face ID *help* police/governments?


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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday November 14 2017, @11:24PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday November 14 2017, @11:24PM (#597055)

    ...all we will see is criminals using alternate methods to go about their activities while the average person loses privacy and can be easily targeted by the criminals you want to catch!

    That's why I don't have a solution. Creating backdoors solves nothing for this reason and just creates more problems.

    To compare it to a physical lock: if the government mandated that every deadbolt accept the government's master key, average citizens would become less secure while criminals would use black market locks with no such restrictions. The metaphor actually works pretty well when properly applied.

    And no, I do not presume that law enforcement is "the good guy". I presume that it is the designated agent of enforcing the laws that we have already agreed to. Appropriate oversight is necessary to keep law enforcement from becoming corrupt. But my entire argument does assume a lot about how the state functions which is not always true. Selective enforcement, minority disenfranchisement, and corruption are all serious problems, but they are outside the scope of discussing how law enforcement can best accomplish the job that they have been given.

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