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Comment by gruez

>While Ovid anticipated this problem, he didn’t foresee its best solution with biometrics. On Macs with Touch ID support and an appropriate keyboard, in many cases (but not yet for keychain passwords) you may first see the prompt for biometric authentication using your fingerprint.

touchid sometimes fail due to grubby fingers. Can't malware spoof a "can't read fingerprint, please enter password" dialog?

I think window's UAC prompt actually solves this problem. In most cases you're just asked to click yes/no, but it also accepts password entry (if you're a limited user and need to log into a admin account). The way that you can tell the prompt is real is that the password prompt dims the entire screen, and (more importantly) the secure attention sequence[1] is blocked. If it's a fake prompt, it won't be able to block the secure attention sequence and the ruse will be exposed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attention_key

parent gruez 2 years ago

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