Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How secure your Android Unlock Pattern ACTUALLY is.”.
The unlock pattern is more secure than you’d think and so in an age where smartphone users are increasingly worried about their security. I wanted to see how it stacks up against the fingerprint sensor and the face scanner, so unlock patterns on Android phones generally abide by three rules. A there have to be a minimum of four pins connected, be any intermediate. Points must be included in the pattern order.
You can’t have one connecting straight to three without including two unless you’ve already used two and see a contact point can only be used once meaning a maximum of nine points. Now, even if you only used four of those nine pins, there are 1624 different combinations. You could end up with so if someone did Nick your phone, they could expect zero point zero six percent chance of getting in.
If that sounds tough, then with five pins you’re, looking at seven thousand one hundred and fifty two possibilities – and this goes up exponentially with the number of pins, except for nine – which is the same as eight, because each of these nine pin patterns are made by taking An eight pin button and connecting to the final remaining pin and because your shape could be anything from a four point to a nine point pattern. Your total combinations are accumulation of these numbers, so in total, three hundred and eighty nine thousand and one hundred and twelve, this gives a stranger, a false acceptance rate or chance of getting through per attempt. A zero point: zero, zero, zero, three percent, considering that most Android phones will lock up after ten attempts or fewer. It is actually impossibly tricky to get through a basic pattern.
As long as you follow a few simple precautions, firstly, that you don’t leave fingerprints ails on your phone, which would give away where your swiping on your screen to unlock it to you. Don’T accidentally show someone sitting behind you. Your pattern pretty easy to avoid by just turning off the option that shows the path of your finger and three. You steer yourself away from biases people are biased towards patterns that make sense whether that’s recognizable shapes or the first letter of their name. The L pattern in particular, is maybe the most common and also probably a thief’s first guess what, if you’re, using an iPhone and you’re setting a six digit, PIN that’s you’re, pretty simple calculation, there, ten digits on-screen and for each number in your PIN.
You can use any one of these ten digits, so the number of possibilities is 10 to the power of six or a million which actually makes it even more secure than the pattern with a 0.0001 percent false acceptance rate. As long as you don’t do something silly and type in a whole row of ones, okay, so what about biometric authentication? It’S a little harder to measure, so we’re gon na have to use some rough estimates. The false acceptance rate for a biometric unlock is the chance that a random average user manages to use their own biometrics to get into your device it’s obviously, this figure is gon na go up and down.
Based on how similar someone looks to you, and also how genetically related they are to you, but we’re just looking at averages. The most basic biometric scanning right now is the 2d face scan, which is the equivalent of using face unlock on your oneplus 60. And for this there is a 0.1 % false acceptance rate, so approximately one every thousand people could get into your phone which, when you compare it to the 0.0001 percent that we saw on the pin, doesn’t seem all that great okay. But what about a fingerprint scanner? Well, most modern phones have something we call a capacitive sensor that uses electrical currents to map out your finger and compared to you a 2d face unlock.
This is about 50 times more secure with the estimate for false acceptance on Apple’s touch ID at around the 0.002 % mark, which is actually the minimum level of recommend security to authenticate payments with, but then stepping this up, another level you’ve got face ID which buyers 30,000 dots onto your face and then uses an infrared sensor to detect the contours in three dimensions. This takes that figure and multiplies it by another twenty, which brings it to that magic figure, one in a million or 0.0001 percent. The exact same as the iPhone pin, but in fact where it gets really interesting, is if you have a rooted, android device and you’re willing to do a bit of tinkering. You can set up a four by four grid, a five by five grid, or even a six by six, obviously not a convenient solution.
But this whole video is just a bit of fun. It’S quite theoretical, and this would explain, eventually increase your security and would move the potential number of patterns to vary approximately millions with a 4×4 tens of millions for a 5×5 and hundreds of millions for a 6×6 making it the hardest security to crack with a 6×6 Grid the probability of a successful attempt is less than zero point: zero: zero, zero, zero, zero zero one percent. Now this might make the biometric tech seem pretty underwhelming in comparison, but there’s two key things to bear in mind: number one: the same person, let’s say a thief: UNIX your phone can attempt multiple patterns, but if it just so happens that their face is dissimilar to Yours and a fingerprint is nothing like yours, then they’ve got pretty much a zero chance of getting in biometrically, no matter how many times they try and number two is that all of these methods are actually more than secure enough. That your main worry is not that someone’s actually going to get through them, but more that someone is going to find a way to bypass them.
Your PIN could be as complex as you like, but it won’t matter if a thief has software that can step through the security. So what are the takeaways? A-All unlock methods are safe, so long as you set them up well B, if you’re using a pin, avoid using a string of zeros and if you’re on a pattern, stay away from conventional shapes and letters and definitely don’t use an L C fingerprint scanners and face Scanners are faster than entering a pin or a pattern. So it’s not exactly a surprise that this is what we’re gravitating towards and D next gen ultrasonic fingerprint scanners are right around the corner for many people and with this it’ll be an order of magnitude better at rejecting false attempts, as it’s moving from 2d scanning to 3D scanning, if you enjoyed this video, it means a lot to me if you could smash the subscribe button down below and as always my name is Aaron. This is mr.
who’s, the boss, I don’t catch you in the next one. .