April 1st, 2008 @ 11:49 pm
Everyone’s A little bit Schauble
Hackers Publish German Minister’s Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com
According to CCC, the print of Schauble’s index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.…
Schauble is a big proponent of the use of fingerprints in passports but is not the CCC’s only target. The group has called for help in obtaining the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Fingerprints and biometrics are cool and all, but they are in no way perfect, and the thing about biometrics is you can’t change you “password” once it has been compromised. As long as man in the middle attacks are still possible, biometrics will be bad juju. Even if they find some way around man in the middle attacks, I would still rather have a password that can change than a retina that someone else can spoof.
