SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Aadhaar biometric database covering over 99% of the adult population in India has been compromised and its contents are now for sale. Full personal details on around 1 billion adult citizens of India, including several biometrics, are available for $8.
takyon: $8 per individual.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Individual Personal Details From "Aadhaar", India's Billion-Person Identity Database, for $8
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 19 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pipedwho on Tuesday January 09 2018, @11:57PM
Apple is probably a bad example of this as they (ie. the company and therefore the employees) don't have access to your iCloud data (beyond the usual sign up details, name, credit card, etc). They intentionally use HSMs for all the crypto keys in a way that allows only your devices to decrypt the data which theoretically prevents en masse compromises. Now, of course, if some of the crypto primitives 'fail' (ie. someone discovers an exploitable weakness in AES, ECC, cryptographic modes, or hardware based random number generators), then everyone on iCloud might be in a world of hurt. But if that happens, the hurt is going to go far beyond Apple and problems with exposed iCloud data.
Of course, if someone gets your iCloud password, then you have a problem. But, that is different from the database compromise described in the article where the entire dataset (or large batches of it) are exposed by a single attack.
Large searchable databases full of sensitive and identifiable information are an extremely bad idea for privacy reasons.