Appeals court rules authorities can force you to biometrically unlock;
what does this mean for passkeys?
While there have been conflicting rulings on this issue, The U.S.
court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has just ruled that authorities
can force you to unlock your devices that are locked using biometric
authentication, in this case with a thumbprint.
The trend of court cases seems to be that forcing biometric unlocking is
OK, but forcing you to reveal a password may not be in similar cases.
It's worth noting that since most passkey implementations require only
the biometric unlock to become available, this would seem to give
authorities full access to all accounts using such passkeys on the
device. In contrast, if passkeys were not in use but passwords were
saved in a password manager under a master password, access to those
accounts would likely not be so easily obtained by authorities in such
a situation.
Irrespective of whether or not you ever plan to be in such a situation,
I still consider the single-layer biometric authentication model for
passkeys to be risky, and this is another example why. -L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
_______________________________________________
google-issues mailing list
https://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/google-issues
