Security News > 2021 > January > Has the coronavirus pandemic affected Apple’s hardware design?
Remember Apple's TouchID sensor, which created quite a stir way back in 2013 when the iPhone 5s came out with a home button that could also read your fingerprint?
What if a court compelled you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint? In the USA, for example, would fingerprint unlock "Codes" enjoy the same Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination as numeric or alphabetic lock codes? Would "Something you have" be protected under the right to silence in the same way as "Something you know"? What if your fingerprint data were stolen? Lock codes and passphrases can easily be changed if you think someone else has phished or stolen them.
How would you get new fingerprints? What if someone cut off your finger to unlock your phone? The good news here is that dead fingers don't work for electrical reasons, so there's not much point in taking such a desperate step.
What if the criminals don't know that it doesn't work and try it anyway? What if someone were to copy your fingerprint? After all, even though we now know how to do DNA matching, fingerprint evidence is still a handy investigative technique in law enforcement for the very simple reason that we leave copies of our fingerprints quite literally on everything we touch.
Interestingly, the last concern turned out to be well-founded, given that just one week after writing about the launch of the iPhone 5s and its biometric home button, we wrote about how the Chaos Computer Club in Germany had announced a way to make fake fingerprints that would fool Apple's sensor.
Despite the CCC's widely publicised hack locking your phone with a fingerprint was certainly better than not locking it at all, and the TouchID feature quickly caught on.