Abine has integrated Face ID support into its Blur password manager and autofill app, enabling users to automatically log into various mobile accounts just by looking at their iPhone X devices.
It’s the latest and possibly most persuasive example yet of the convenience of Apple’s Face ID facial recognition system, which projects a 30,000-dot infrared grid onto users’ faces to establish and validate biometric profiles for the purpose of authentication. While many users appreciate the convenience of unlocking your phone just by looking at it, the appreciation is considerably amplified when this process is applied to all of the online accounts normally requiring complex passwords that are often forgotten or misplaced by users who aren’t already taking advantage of password manager systems.
In a statement announcing Blur’s Face ID support, Abine emphasized the security of the facial recognition system in comparison to Touch ID, the pioneering fingerprint recognition system used on previous iPhone devices. “Face ID, in Apple’s research, has shown that the probability of someone else unlocking a phone with Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000 as opposed to Touch ID at 1 in 50,000,” the company asserted.
That isn’t to say it’s foolproof. Last autumn, a digital security firm announced that it had spoofed Face ID using an elaborate mask molded on one of its own researchers. But the expertise, time, and effort required for that presentation attack will not be readily available to most fraudsters, nor can many everyday iPhone X users be expected to fall victim to it. And that means for the vast majority of Blur users on the iPhone X, logging into their accounts just got even easier and more secure.
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