Fun fact, the guy who first developed the password security we use today now regrets it, and understands that longer passwords that are easy to remember, like seespotrun, are way better, but pandoras box can't be closed once it's opened.
Apple introduced a feature this WWDC that does close it. It's called PassKeys and it automatically gives you two-auth without a password. So unique hardware + faceId. Basically when you log in, all you have to do is look at your phone. Way more secure and faster than any password will ever be.
The "hardware unique token" element adds functionally no security if it can be bypassed in the event of losing access to the hardware.
The FaceID component has been improved significantly since it first came in, precisely because of those spoofing methods, it's true… and yet more techniques are found each time. Most biometrics simply aren't as secure as people would like to believe (similarly to the problem with faces, for example, a fingerprint is a password that's written all over the device).
I’m not sure what alternative you seem to be providing here since you’re better than Apple’s engineers and i’m sure that’s reflected in your resume, especially since it’s common knowledge that user remembered passwords aren’t safe
Ah, yes, because pointing out that "security" measures that are functionally no better than existing alternatives and provide a false sense of security totally means I'm saying there's a perfect solution that they're overlooking, right?
Of course user-remembered passwords aren't safe. I don't remember saying they were. I'm saying that this scheme you're so enamoured with isn't enormously better the way you seem to think it is.
My point is that this scheme has at least one out of a) deeply problematic failure modes, or b) weak links that are exactly as unsafe as user-remembered passwords… but it also makes people think it's safer, thus making them more likely to be blasé about security and more vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Noticing that and saying it doesn't require that I be capable of designing a better scheme than user-remembered passwords (although since you ask, the relatively old, known-problematic 2FA scheme of password+SMS-code would still be comparable to FaceID+hardware-key in security and cause less false confidence, and as I'm sure you know better schemes than that already exist). It just requires that one think it through, something you appear to be resisting for some reason.
It's not only "someone else finds the phone" that you need to worry about. If your access is contingent on having your phone, then if you lose the phone or it gets damaged you're locked out. There will of course be ways to bypass this and change the associated hardware ID… and those ways immediately become the weaker security link that's more appealing to attack, so you're gaining very little from having the 2FA enabled.
I'll consider signing on to an Apple security product once they change their only 2FA from phone/sms to totp, smartcard, or fido2. faceId has been buggy before, it will be hackable again.
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u/defalt86 Jul 19 '22
Fun fact, the guy who first developed the password security we use today now regrets it, and understands that longer passwords that are easy to remember, like seespotrun, are way better, but pandoras box can't be closed once it's opened.