Bitcoin Forum

Dear All,

Good evening , I just curious whether fingerprint on mobile wallet is safe?
since I using blockchain wallet only 2 option login 4 digit pin or finger print login.
please advise , thank you

BTC

What wallet you are talking about that asking for fingerprint verification?
Never heard any bitcoin wallet that asking for fingerprint. For me, it's not safe because giving fingerprint is just like giving your identity.
So I suggest you go for 4 digit pin than a fingerprint.

If you want a secured wallet only hard wallet and cold wallet are the best and secured. Like ledger nano as hardware wallet or offline Electrum wallet for the desktop wallet.

Thank you for reply question , as newbie thought Blockchain wallet is safe mobile wallet  https://www.photobox.co.uk/my/photo?album_id=5691551043&photo_id=502069561183


time to buy ledger nano  ;D

No, definitely not.

A good fingerprint sensor is pretty safe. Which means that it is hard to fake your fingerprint.
You'd definitely need an imprint of your finger and use some good material to fake it.

But all the fingerprint sensors on mobiles are surprisingly easy to cheat on.
This applies to any other biometric identification on mobile phones. Mobile phones have to be relatively cheap. You can't use a sensor which would cost 3 times more than the whole mobile costs in the end.

Those fingerprint sensors of a mobile are just gimmicks. They aren't very secure at all.




That's definitely a good decision.
A hardware wallet combines security and usability. It is way more secure than a software wallet.

You should use mobile software wallets for insignificant amounts of coins. Very few good wallets support fingerprint unlock. The only one that comes to my mind is Blockstream Green Wallet (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greenaddress.greenbits_android_wallet&hl=pl), but it still lacks many other important features. Samourai Wallet (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samourai.wallet&hl=pl) has many advanced features, but you can't unlock it with your fingerprint.


If you really need to access your funds on the go then consider buying a Ledger Nano X. It's more expensive than the Nano S, but you will be able to connect it to your phone via Bluetooth.

It's not really surprising, but certainly way too easy.
If you want to dig deeper in how insecure fingerprint authentication via your phone is, there's some great research on AI-generated DeepMasterPrints (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.07386.pdf).
It's an interesting read, that much I can promise you. Especially if you had been using fingerprints in combination with your phone before.

Or simply by the numbers:
A one in five chance of someone getting access to your wallet with a MasterPrint isn't the security standard you should set for yourself.

I guess, but I don't think it's exactly as if someone could determine your identity via the fingerprint-reading mechanism unless that fingerprint was uploaded to the device or something.  I don't know exactly how these things work as far as keeping your fingerprint confidential.  

I was just looking at flash drives today on Amazon, and I saw a few that had a fingerprint scanner on them and I thought that was pretty cool, as I'd never seen anything like that before.  Seems like a great way to keep a flash drive or anything else fairly safe.  Maybe I'm just being naive here?  Anyway, I've never seen a hardware wallet with that tech incorporated into it yet, and I think I've browsed every wallet on Amazon so far.

Huh.  I'll have to check those out.  I don't need another wallet, as I have such a trivial amount of crypto that it wouldn't even faze me if all of it got stolen, but I very much like the concept of hardware wallets and have two so far (only one of which has any coins on it).  Thanks for the info.

Edit:
Yeah, that's what I thought but I wasn't completely sure.  I do think it'd be cool if there was a hardware wallet with fingerprint authentication, and I'll bet one will come along eventually.

Depends on the sensor and settings used, for numbers refer to my post above.

Both of those are software wallets.
Further wallets that come to mind are Copay (https://github.com/bitpay/copay), which uses an optional fingerprint lock to encrypt your wallet,
and I would assume that all branded wallets that fork from copay offer the same (bitcoin.com runs a branded version of copay, eg).

Then there's also MyCelium (https://wallet.mycelium.com/), which IIRC has a feature like that as well, but I'm not 100% sure on that and do not use that one, so cannot confirm.

I didn't dig into the way CoPay handles your fingerprint, but it's open source, so you should be able to find out whether the fingerprint information is stored locally on your device, or shared and stored on any of BitPay's servers.

---

What comes to mind are wallets like Ledger's Blue (https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-blue) and Ellipal (https://www.amazon.com/Cryptocurrency-Hardware-ELLIPAL-Internet-Multi-Currency/dp/B07JKS82JN/) (or their new Titan (https://www.ellipal.com/pages/ellipal-titan)).
Both of them are very similar to smartphones in design, and I agree that it's only a question of time before someone takes that step and adds a fingerprint sensor in one of those, same as it happened for smartphones.

Don't waste your time on the Blockstream Green Wallet. It looks promising, but I mentioned it only because it supports fingerprint unlock. Even though Samourai Wallet is in early-access, it's way ahead of Green Wallet. Samourai has a built-in mixer, basic coin control, supports Tor and RBF. You can even sign transactions offline just like if you were using Electrum.

Hi, thank you Sir for good answer , now I'm so disappointed with blockchain wallet



sure  ;D

Since you're using a mobile wallet, I'm going to completely assume that you don't have a life-changing amount of money in there. I hope you're using an airgapped device or a hardware wallet for majority of your funds. If that's the case, go with it. Fingerprint locks might be unsecure like others have said, I'd personally use it simply due to the convenience. But then again, ONLY IF you don't have that much funds on your mobile wallet.