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The FBI used a suspect's face to unlock his iPhone in Ohio case
When Apple debuted Face ID with the iPhone X last year, it raised an interesting legal question: can you be compelled to unlock your phone by looking at it? In an apparent first, Forbes reports that the FBI got a suspect to unlock his phone during a raid in August.
In August, the FBI raided the home of Grant Michalski, looking for evidence that he had sent or received child pornography. They were armed with a search warrant [warning: this documentation contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse] which allowed them to search Michalski's computer for evidence, and during the raid, agents recovered his iPhone X.
The agents who found the iPhone asked Michalski to unlock the device via Face ID, which he did. They "placed the [phone] into airplane mode and examined it by looking through the files and folders manually and documenting the findings with pictures."
The facial unlocking was voluntary (or so they claim), and the Columbus Police and FBI have devices capable of bypassing the phone's passcode protection. So much for security.
Also at AppleInsider.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 01 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)
The $5 wrench method need not even apply for something that just needs a face scan. Can he even do anything, if he was held down for the face unlock? How about, if he was unconscious / dead? I'm guessing unconscious or dead would work just as well as alive for current face detection software. So long as the dead was fresh and not seriously deteriorated. All you need to do is slip him something that knocked him unconscious, use his unconscious face to unlock the phone, and Profit! Or something like that. Probably couldn't be slipping a drug to someone, if you're a government agency.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @11:15PM
Hopefully face recognition would involve some monitoring of the pupils to ensure that the person is still alive in the same way that a fingerprint scanner hopefully checks for a pulse or similar so that you can't used a severed digit or a fake finger.
Biometrics is a really stupid thing to use for things of this nature where you care about security as there's a ton of corner cases and if it gets compromised, you can't reset the password.