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posted by takyon on Friday December 28 2018, @12:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the dead-man's-chest dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

How police are using corpses to unlock phones

Police in Largo, Florida, recently tried to use a dead man's finger to open his phone. This was to the complete astonishment of his family and probably also the staff at the Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home. Detectives just rolled right in with Linus F. Phillip's phone and asked staff where his corpse was. They then attempted to unlock his phone by pressing his hands and fingers on to the fingerprint sensor. The dead man's fiancée, Victoria Armstrong, told press, "I just felt so disrespected and violated."

Mr. Phillip, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed outside a gas station after police claimed he tried to drive away during a search. His death was ruled a "justifiable homicide." His family does not trust the investigation into his death. "They were trying to open up that cellphone using a dead man's finger," the family's attorney, John Trevena, said. "That's disgusting beyond words."

Attempts by police to use the dead man's hands for what they claimed was "to preserve evidence" by unlocking his phone were unsuccessful. The alleged evidence on his phone, the press wrote, was "to aid in the investigation into Phillip's death and a separate inquiry into drugs," according to Lt. Randall Chaney.

Like it or not, what the police did was legal -- and it's becoming a common practice. In November 2016, FBI agents used the bloody finger belonging to Ohio State University killer Abdul Razak's iPhone in hopes of finding information and evidence. They got the timing wrong, missing the window before the phone required a passcode and ended up cracking the device with other means.

That was the first publicly known instance of posthumous Touch ID access attempts by authorities, though there have been more since. "Separate sources close to local and federal police investigations in New York and Ohio," Forbes wrote in March, "who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to speak on record, said it was now relatively common for fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple iPhones."

It's widely accepted nowadays, then, when a person dies, they may specify to be (or not to be) an organ donor, to be cremated or buried, or even to be wrapped in bedsheets and unexamined. Perhaps now is an era calling for the need of overly specific privacy and security instructions, including no posthumous fingerprinting, no unlocking of private folders, or even "bury me with my phone."


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:11AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:11AM (#779635)

    Ah, you're working with military/govt stuff by the sounds of it. Yeah, that's a lot more secure than COTS gear for general use. Typical setup we encountered was a basic IR illuminator (so you could fool it with a B&W photo) for which the tamper protection was four machine screws, that sent the fingerprint image in plaintext over building-wide ethernet to a back-end running unpatched XP Embedded where it matched against templates in an Access database. There were so many holes in that that we didn't even know where to begin attacking it.

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  • (Score: 2) by pipedwho on Monday December 31 2018, @12:16AM (1 child)

    by pipedwho (2032) on Monday December 31 2018, @12:16AM (#780111)

    The stuff I did was so long ago that the companies that did this stuff all had government/corporate/military as their primary customers. These days I guess the industry has devolved into cheap and nasty products that are primarily purchased for 'feel good' security.

    Once the real engineers have finished making things, the tale end seems to pop up in the industry with accountants and sales guys in charge of other companies doing 'bitza' system integration of parts to satisfy some set of marketing buzzwords at minimal cost.

    [rant: on]

    It's like ATMs. Back in the day, they were secure, easy to use, with quick response times. These days, ATMs are slow as all get out, keypad debounce is incompetently implemented so you end up missing characters and doubling others anyway. It takes forever just to bring up the 'enter PIN' code, and then another age to process the transaction. And worst of all, they run a consumer grade OS where there is a security advisory every few months pertaining to the ATMs.

    And something that has been really annoying me of late is the laggy, slow public transport gate/bus card readers that are far far slower than they should be. When I was working for a company 20 years ago designing some of the early contactless card systems for public transport, we were given specs where the card transaction had to complete within 100ms at 10cm range with up to 6 cards in the field. That was hard, but we got it working. Even the slow triple-DES cards that we were using still let us meet the spec, with an RS-485 network for managing blacklists and controlling the gates. These days, you're lucky if the transaction takes under 2 seconds. So what happens is that every second guy in the queue ahead of you puts his card on the reader, and pulls it away too quickly, then an error comes up on a display that he's already walked past, and the gate won't open. So he takes a few steps backwards from the closed gate and tries the card again, but this time he spends some time taking the card out of his wallet first and holds it there a few extra seconds just to be sure. Meanwhile, the queues are building up while you watch your train pulling away from the platform.

    It seems like every industry that was at one time cutting edge falls into a malaise of incompetent low skilled engineering with people getting paid off to relax specs so shitty products can compete against properly designed products that actually work properly.

    [rant: off]

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday December 31 2018, @01:51AM

      by driverless (4770) on Monday December 31 2018, @01:51AM (#780130)

      Hmm, and now I'm curious to know who you are outside of SN, but there's no PM facility... I have similar rants, e.g. the contactless payment system used by some bus lines in France which is slower and less reliable than the paper-based system it replaced, or the contactless ticketing system where the joke was that passengers would have to walk down a 100' tunnel to give the transaction time to complete.