Hacker Club Publishes German Official's Fingerprint 253
A number of readers let us know about the Chaos Computer Club's latest caper: they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (link is to a Google translation of the German original). The club has been active in opposition to Germany's increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club's aims captured Schäuble's fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint. The article says a ministry spokesman alluded to possible legal action against the club.
couldn't possibly have negative consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh all the people to humiliate... a senior public official who sets policy for something you directly care about.
This couldn't possibly turn out badly.
No better thant he status quo? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd hate to see people get proficient at faking fingerprints, because that leads to all sorts of interesting results in the realm of law. If fingerprint fraud becomes widespread, for example, will fingerprints at a crime scene still be valid evidence in court?
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
"The" finger print? (Score:2, Interesting)
DMCA (Score:2, Interesting)
It would by interesting to try to tell the cops that they can not have your finger prints because it violates the DMCA.
Has anyone tried this on a fingerprint reader? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you really get a good enough copy? How hard is it? (After all, any security can be broken somehow. So an essential aspect is the "cost" of breaking the security)
Re:couldn't possibly have negative consequences (Score:1, Interesting)
I know german law is byzantine, but surely they can find something along the lines of estoppel [wikipedia.org] in there.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Duress codes.
Enter one code to authenticate normally, another to flag up that you are being forced to authenticate.
Not quite ironclad, but an extra level of safety.
isn't biometric authentication a good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
So in addition to needing to know a pin or password, someone also needs to have stolen my fingerprint in order to take money out of my bank account. Isn't this what is called two factor authentication? Isn't that a good thing that makes it that much more difficult to steal an identity?
According to this article Germany's new passports:
http://www.itsmig.de/best_practices/ePass_en.php [itsmig.de]
they contain both fingerprint data, and a picture of the person. Thus, to steal your identity, a person would have to steal your passport, look like you, and also steal your fingerprint. This actually seems like a pretty good system that would prevent someone from using a stolen passport to steal the rightful owners identity. Without the fingerprint data, an identity theft doesn't need to do as much work.
That said, I'm not from germany, so maybe there additional nuances about this thing that I'm missing.
Perfect alibi (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing dumb thing he could get caught with is when he leaves wheelchair tracks [wordpress.com] at the scene of the crime.
Wait until the mental dinosaurs retire? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's the same in politics. People call the U.S. government's action in Iraq a war, but killing Iraqis is only a distraction from the real purpose. The real purpose is stealing money from the U.S. taxpayer.
Obviously, at more than $1,000,000 per Iraqi killed, most of them very poor, the "war" is mostly about money, and the killing is only required to draw attention away from the real purpose.
How will the astounding ignorance of technology get resolved? Maybe we will have to wait until all the old dinosaurs retire. When I say "old dinosaurs", I am not talking about chronological age, I am talking about mental age. Some 24-year-olds are old dinosaurs mentally.
There actually *are* things to like about Germany (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:T-shirt (Score:5, Interesting)
I was amused to see that the technology's weaknesses had made it to the Scooby-Doo level already. I don't know if that exact combination would work, but I've heard of similar successful attacks.
Re:isn't biometric authentication a good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the problem is that you (and many other people) seem to think authentication is the same as identification. It's not. Biometrics are awesome as part of two-factor authentication, but they're horrible as a means of identifying yourself.
Identification is the problem of determining, on your own, the identity of a given person.
Authentication is the problem of determining whether or not a given identity corresponds to a given person.
The difference is that, in authentication, you are given both a single person and a single identity, and your job is to answer true or false as to whether they match. Authentication is a yes/no question: your answer is either yes or no. In identification, you are given only a person, and your job is to produce a matching identity. Identification is not usually a yes/no question, although in some cases it can be disguised as one -- for example: to answer "Is this person a terrorist?" you typically have to determine a person's true identity (which a terrorist is not likely to offer to you) and then check that identity against known terrorist databases.
National governments are fully aware of this distinction, and they exploit public confusion to further their agenda. Biometrics are being advertised as authentication tools (does this passport accurately identify this person?), for which they work pretty well, but in reality governments are using biometrics for identification (is this person a terrorist?), an approach which has fail written all over it.
Even for authorization, biometrics are not a panacea, but they are at least a useful tool capable of contributing some benefits when employed properly. For identification, biometrics are an unmitigated disaster, for many reasons, chief among them the base rate fallacy [wikipedia.org], which says that the accuracy of an identity test drops precipitiously when the test is presented with large databases of identities.
Yep! Really, really well done! (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA has the same problem as fingerprints... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way to be sure you're looking at the right DNA is to stick a needle into a person and take a sample from deep inside them...
Most biometric systems are junkware being pushed by people who are after the lucrative government contracts. The bottom line is they don't really work too well.
The only one which might work is retinal scanning but for whatever reason I don't see that on anybody's ID card agenda. Why not? I don't know...
Duress codes (Score:3, Interesting)
Agents dropped behind Axis lines were taught how to use 'security codes' if they were compromised (i.e. captured by the Nazis).
The imbeciles in London who received their messages, especially from the totally infiltrated Dutch circuits, were so stupid as to message them back saying 'why are you omitting your security codes?'
It got so bad that on April 1st 1944 the London operators received a plaintext message from the head of the Nazi operation thanking them for their cooperation (I think his name was Geiske).
Hundreds died. It soured British/Dutch relations for a generation. It was monstrous, inexcusable loss of life.
Don't EVER underestimate the power of stupidity.