> Bio-metrics are just convenient because they are unique and hard\impossible to replicate.
But if your biometric is able to be faked, you can't change it like you can change a typical text based password. There's no "reset your password" equivalent for biometrics.
Let's ignore the part about biometrics being faked since this seems to be a point of contention.
Isn't it a fair argument that secret keys should be mutable by the user? In the future, some unforeseen event COULD occur which compromises or otherwise renders the particular biometric unusable. Now what?
But they are... Firstly, with how it works. even if you use the same finger to generate hundreds of keys, they should all be different because we are using noise\randomness within the algorithm itself. different sensors will generate different outputs and therefore it is pointless to worry about the key used stolen.
I think what you want is secret keys completely detached from the user. we have that as well with hardware tokens.
Once they have a way to fake your biometric though they have it for forever, that's the point. With a password you have a way to provide a key only known to you and while it can be faked, it can also be reset, you can't reset your fingerprint without surgery
> What's easier to do? stealing someone's fingerprint or cracking\guessing their password.
> Definitely the latter.
You sure about that? A properly generated (i.e. random) password won't be cracked or guessed in any reasonable amount of time, whereas a model of your fingerprint(s) can be lifted from any object you've touched and used to create a silicone mold capable of fooling many fingerprint readers. And you only have 10 of them at best; once all your fingerprints are known to potential attackers that's it; you can't use fingerprint authentication any more for the rest of your life.
Really? can you back this up? I can. I work in the cyber industry for a decade now. I've seen the data, I've seen attempt to bypass both.
Biometrics are by far better for the vast vast majority of people.
Do you even listen to what you're describing here? trailing someone, trying to extract fingerprints? this isn't a Jame Bond movie.
Cyber attacks are common because they are completely digital\anonymous by nature.
Secondly, humans can't remember\generate truly secure passwords, unique for every account they own. they usually rely on a tool like a password manager.
PM are definitely better than weak passwords but are actually weaker than biometrics. they are a central point of failure and have been attacked in the past.
For the average Joe, biometrics are more secure since he is not using such tool anyways.
It doesn't take James Bond to lift some fingerprints off a surface. Anyone with physical proximity and a little practice can manage that much. People have managed to fool fingerprint readers with Gummi Bears before, much less specially-designed equipment. It's a practical attack, unlike attempting to brute-force a truly random 10-character password from a 78-character alphabet (uppercase, lowercase, digits, and half of the 32 symbols on a PC-104 keyboard).
> Secondly, humans can't remember\generate truly secure passwords, unique for every account they own. they usually rely on a tool like a password manager.
Which is perfectly fine. You aren't going to break their password manager either. The weak point is the users who aren't using password managers, because they try to get by with less-than-random passwords which are susceptible to cracking. Or biometrics, which aren't secret at all.
I mean you don't have to give it away if you think Google is storing databases of fingerprints for the lizard masters to track you down.
FIDO simply wants to make authentication stronger, you can use hardware keys that have a key burnt into them which is unique and much harder to brute-force than passwords.
Again according to how biometrics are described in whitepapers\industry, we extract features from the fingerprint\face sometimes very little compared to the actual biometric and use it to derive a key.
that key cannot be reversed to get the original features and different algorithms use different features.
> that key cannot be reversed to get the original features
"As a result, the early common belief among the biometrics community of templates irreversibility has been proven wrong. It is now an accepted fact that it is possible to reconstruct from an unprotected template a synthetic sample that matches the bona fide one."
-- Reversing the irreversible: A survey on inverse biometrics
"from an unprotected template" do you even read?
stop trying to find some random internet page to justify yourself, have you ever seen a biometric implementation? I have.
I don't know what counts as a non-random internet page, but here[0] is an article published by the "European Data Protection Supervisor" titled "14 Misunderstandings With Regard To Biometric Identification And Authentication", with number 12 being "Biometric information converted to a hash is not recoverable". It states:
> there are studies showing that the hash could be reversible, that is, it could be possible to obtain the original biometric pattern, especially if the secret of the key used to generate the hash is violated
So yes, there are secret keys involved (which the user has no control over), and no, I've never read through the code of a biometric implementation, but ultimately the space of possible values that someone's face or finger could reliably display is much smaller than even MD5, so it can be brute-forced.
If you have some non-random internet page to justify yourself, and show how much entropy is contained in a biometric hash, and how resistant to cracking that hash is, and how well secured those secret keys are, then I'd be happy to learn more.
Well it depends on how you define replicate, I'm not aware of a technology that can perfectly recreate someone's face\fingerprint.
a photo\mask isn't perfect and actually in some instances they fail to work vs sensors because of that.
It is more of a question of how robust is the authentication method.(can a photo\mask fool it? which can happen sometime but usually require pretty high quality sample)
Username is simply an ID. Password is how we truly verify who the user is.
Bio-metrics are just convenient because they are unique and hard\impossible to replicate.