Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
Just to keep things in perspective, the goal of Touch ID is not to be unhackable. The goal is to get more consumers to move from <i>zero</i> security to pretty good security.<p>A very large number of people don't put any kind of passcode of any kind on their phone, simply because it's inconvenient. Touch ID is designed for them. It's not designed to secure nuclear footballs.<p>Touch ID is going to <i>massively</i> reduce the number of totally unsecured iPhones that require zero effort to access. That's the goal.<p>I think some people see "fingerprint scanner" and think "military-grade security" because that's where we've seen scanners before in movies and such. But this is really very much a solution for the consumer market, where <i>convenience</i> and <i>usability</i> are critical features of a security system. Sometimes infosec folks forget that. If you make it too hard to use (passcodes), people just bypass it. So you can blame the user, or you can try to design something easier to use. If in the end you've improved the overall security landscape, you've succeeded. I think that's what Apple is doing here.