Undoubtedly, Apple owned this week’s technology press. Apple revealed the iPhone 5S on Tuesday at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Amidst Nokia sarcastically thanking Apple for copying its brightly colored outer covers in the iPhone 5C, and the various memes cropping up on the Internet related to the National Security Agency’s access to the fingerprint database that Apple allegedly will own, allow me to delve a shade deeper on the fingerprint sensor that has created so many waves.
On July 27, a security company by the name of AuthenTec announced its acceptance of Apple’s $356 million acquisition offer. Talks of the deal started as early as May. This was not publicized and it is suspected that AuthenTec was prohibited by its contract with Apple to talk about the acquisition. AuthenTec held the Intellectual Property on 2-D fingerprint sensors.
The iPhone 5S has a fingerprint sensor embedded right in its home button. The new home button is a sapphire crystal that acts as a lens while the metallic ring surrounding it detects whether your finger is on the home button or not. The sensor beneath the lens layer captures the difference in conductivity of the epidermal layers of your skin to generate an image — your fingerprint.
Unlocking your phone with your fingerprint is one thing, but authenticating iTunes purchases with your fingerprint is another. It is this extensive use of the fingerprint for cloud applications that has cultivated a generic fear that Apple is going to build a database of fingerprints which, consequently, the NSA will be able to access.
Apple has clarified that the fingerprint image will rest locally and securely in a chip inside the phone. There are numerous ways of allowing the pressing of your finger on the home button to authenticate a song purchase on iTunes. The fingerprint image can be cryptographically converted into a huge number used as a hash key. This key, nothing but a series of bits, can then be used to authenticate almost any application that requires authentication. It is this seemingly random series of numbers that will be sent out via the Internet and not your fingerprint. It would be primitive to suggest that Apple sends the actual fingerprint via the Internet (unless Steve Jobs was secretly an NSA advisor and Apple holds tutorials in cryptography for the NSA engineers).
Apple is hardly the first company to experiment with fingerprint recognition as a means of authentication: Motorola first rolled out the Motorola Atrix in 2011 which gave the users an option to swipe on the screen and have the phone authenticate the user based on the fingerprint scan it took from the swipe. But the Atrix fingerprint scan was buggy, and users found themselves swiping multiple times without success before simply entering the passcode to unlock the phone.
It’s in light of recent events and NSA’s surveillance that Apple has faced the brunt of the criticism from the Internet community at large. Data privacy is a valid concern, but readers, at this point in history, we all can do with fewer conspiracy rumors.
