IBM Introduces Biometric Thinkpad 195
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has added biometric security to its thinkpad notebooks. The next generation of T series thinkpads will have an integrated fingerprint scanner for added security. The latest machines will also include some pretty cool encryption software, that will keep your hard disk safe, but still let you backup and restore images. This guy managed to get his hands on an early prototype T42 with the new security features integrated."
IBM is pretty cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Back on topic now, this laptop is nifty in itself. EArlier on another
=) happy
Re:swipe scan (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But what happens... (Score:2, Insightful)
False security (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this useful? (Score:1, Insightful)
If the thief has physical access to the machine, nothing short of encryption is going to prevent him or her from getting at your data.
YOUR RIGHTS ONLINE - IBM is bad news (Score:1, Insightful)
Now some of that hardware is reviewed and you can't get over how neato it is.
What about "your rights online" people!?
Ugh.. this could go wrong.. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is what happens.. they give you a wolf in sheeps clothing.. and for awhile that wolf stays dorment and you like it and you pet
Good for security, annoying for everything else (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But what happens... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a good pretense for Social Engineering ones way into such a system.
So many critics... (Score:4, Insightful)
My 2 cents...
The fingerprint reader is of a type that has not been 'fooled' yet. Yes, contact readers are easy to fool. This is not a contact reader. It reads the capacitive properties of the ridges and valleys that make up your finger print. This is actually quite cool since a severed finger does not have the same capacitive properties, and the reading is of live tissue *under* the skin, not your dead skin at the surface. So, a minor injury isn't going to be a big deal and the mafia cannot cut your finger off and use it. Furthermore, the extra small footprint of the reader is nice because there is less opportunity to damage the reader with scratches.
The idea is to register more than one finger and fingers from both hands. Of course, nothing is foolproof, but the idea here was to include a low cost yet effective way to provide biometric access control to the laptop. The embedded security system (ESS) protects a lot of things including a password vault. Password vaults have their drawbacks, the most obvious of which is if you have the 'master' password, you now have *all* of the passwords that user has stored in the vault. Average users tend to use simple master passwords, making the password vault a huge risk. This is a way to provide the functional equivalent of a strong password to unlock the vault without making the user have to remember a complicated password or some hardware key.
I am very impressed with the entire package. I think it will make it much simpler for IT to deploy things like ESS without destroying all of the value in ESS because users choose crappy passwords. There are a number of add-ons that make it very appropriate for enterprise deployment, including centralized key storage and disaster recovery software.
My biggest problem to date with this kind of software was it hasn't been real reliable in the recovery category. I could make it very secure, but God help me if I had a hard drive crash or an OS go belly up. The 'backups' of this data were often times 'too secure' to be recovered. This latest package of hardware/software has many of the previous holes filled in and I am happy to report success in all of the tests I have conducted so far.
Of course, anybody can implement this poorly. However, IBM has done a stellar job with it this time. I feel privileged to get to play with stuff like this.
-Shawn
Re:Remember your friends (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless I'm an idiot, this means that the amount of data the scanner stores is inversely proportional to its accuracy. For example, if one were to store a critical 20% of the data neccessary to recreate a fingerprint, with use of the partials on the keyboard and the top of the laptop, one should be able to recreate the print accurately enough using means like a laser (3d) printer, a bit of spare rubber, and anything with a curved surface. Since the scanner is not 100% accurate, it would confirm, anyway.
Besides, this laptop defeats its own purpose. How difficuilt would it be for someone to make a 1:1 image of the hard drive and decrypt it. Or, if you were pressed on time for the encryption, simply to pop the hood,remove the box, and emulate a 'success' signal with use of a relatively simple circuit, something one could construct in an hour with a soldering iron and proper documentation.
All in all, this is a fun toy, but oh so useless.