Will Apple’s Touch ID Make Biometrics Cool?

Apple’s clockwork schedule of releasing a new iPhone every September has delivered an intriguing security angle, putting biometrics at the top of the tech news agenda.

Click here to view Figure 1.

In case you missed it, the new iPhone 5S features a fingerprint scanner that will be used to unlock the phone and to make purchases from iTunes on the device. The sensor is protected by sapphire crystal, “one of the clearest, hardest materials available” in the words of Senior VP for Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio. The crystal also focuses the “image” of your fingerprint onto the sensor.

Speculation has been rife that this technology would make an appearance since Apple purchased a mobile security company that had developed fingerprint sensor chips in July 2012 for $356 million. Many people thought that Apple would introduce a fingerprint scanner with the release of the iPhone 5 in September 2012, but the Cupertino-based company has taken its time to integrate the hardware and software.

This is a wise decision. If the fingerprint scanner was released and didn’t work particularly well it would spell a disaster for the company. Anyone who has ever used Apple’s much-heralded Siri — a voice-controlled assistant on the phone — will know that technology, no matter how effective in the Keynote demos, can deliver an indifferent experience to the user at times. But Siri is a nice-to-have: It doesn’t do anything that the phone can’t do anyway, it just does it under the control of your voice.

Technology for its own sake?

Apple’s Touch ID, however, has to work. If users are unable to unlock their phone because the sensor is playing up then the whole function of the phone could become inaccessible — although presumably Apple will allow users to enter a password to unlock as well. The company is already defending Touch ID before the critics have their chance to attack it. Apple’s Jony Ive:

“It’s not just rampant technology for technology’s sake,” he says. Every component has to enhance the user’s experience, otherwise it has no place in the device.

Steven Hope, from authentication company Winfrasoft, has his doubts about the device:

The iPhone fingerprint (Touch ID) feature is obviously very new and unproven implementation. Typically the quality of the biometric hardware in mass market devices such as this is very low to keep costs down and have historically been very easy to thwart — keep an eye out for an iPhone 5s hack soon!

But this is Apple. One thing no one could accuse Apple of is producing cheap devices. Remember, this technology cost them a humungous $356 million; surely for that much it has to work, doesn’t it? Time will tell.

Encryption

The next question is one of what happens to the sensitive fingerprint data. Again, Apple has already pre-empted these questions. Riccio explains:

All fingerprint information is encrypted and stored inside the secure enclave in our new A7 chip. Here it’s locked away from everything else; accessible only by the Touch ID sensor. It’s never available to other software, and it’s never stored on Apple servers or backed up to iCloud.

However, Apple has slightly missed a trick here for me as it had an opportunity to further allay the fears of how biometric technology fundamentally works. As Ingersoll Rand’s Dave Bulless explained to us last year, the image of an individual’s finger or hand is passed through a unique algorithm that converts the data into an encrypted number. If Apple had been able to convey the fact that no “images” of a fingerprint are actually stored, then it might have been able to quash that biometric myth.

But assuming that the technology works, and assuming that the public trust Apple’s ability to keep their data secure, could this be the beginning of a golden age for biometrics? A viable, high-profile biometric solution could be the thing that finally instils belief and trust in biometric devices. Editor of Planet Biometrics Mark Lockie told the BBC that “the industry has been waiting for a moment like this.” Well, it won’t have to wait much longer. The new iPhone is available on September 20.