How secure your Android Unlock Pattern ACTUALLY is.

The

unlock

pattern

is more

secure

than you think, and so in an age where smartphone users are increasingly concerned about their security, I wanted to see how it compares to the fingerprint sensor and scanner. Facial

unlock

pattern

s on Android phones generally follow three rules: There has to be a minimum of four pins connected. any intermediate points must be included in the pattern order. You can't have one connected directly to three without including two, unless you've already used two and see a point of contact. It can only be used once, which means a maximum of nine points now, even if you only use four of those nine pins, there are 1624 different combinations you could end up with, so if someone Nicked

your

phone, they could expect zero point zero six percent chance of getting in.

If that sounds difficult, then with five pins you are looking at seven thousand one hundred and fifty-two possibilities and this increases exponentially with the number of pins, except nine, which is the same as eight because each of these nine pin patterns is made by taking an eight-pin button and connecting it to the last remaining pin and because its shape could be anything from a four-dot pattern to a nine-dot pattern,

your

total combinations are an accumulation of these numbers, so in total three hundred eighty-nine thousand one hundred twelve. This gives a stranger a false acceptance rate or chance of achieving per attempt a zero point zero zero zero three percent.

Considering that most Android phones crash after ten attempts or less, it's

actually

incredibly difficult to achieve. a basic pattern provided that First, follow some simple precautions: Don't leave fingerprints on your phone, which would reveal where you slide your finger on the screen to unlock it. It doesn't accidentally show you someone sitting behind you. Its pattern is quite easy to avoid by simply deactivating the option that shows the trajectory of your finger and three you move away from the prejudices. People are biased toward patterns that make sense, whether they're recognizable shapes or the first letter of their name.

The L pattern in particular is perhaps the most common as well. Probably a thief's first guess: What if you're using an iPhone and you're setting up a six-digit PIN? It's a pretty simple calculation, there are ten digits on the screen and for each number in your PIN you can use any of these ten. digits, so the number of possibilities is 10 to the power of six or a million, which

actually

makes it even safer than the pattern with a false acceptance rate of 0.0001 percent, as long as you don't do something stupid and you write a whole row of Well, what about biometric authentication?

It's a little harder to measure, so we'll have to use some rough estimates. The false acceptance rate for a biometric unlock is the chance that a random average user will manage to use their own biometric data to get into their device, obviously this figure will go up and down based on how similar someone looks to you and also what how genetically related it is to you, but we're just looking at averages. The most basic biometric scan at the moment is 2D face scanning which is the equivalent of using face unlock on your oneplus 60 and for this there is a 0.1% false acceptance rate so about one in a thousand people could access your phone, which, when you compare it to the 0.0001 percent we saw on the pin, doesn't seem very good, but what about a fingerprint scanner?

Well, most modern phones have something we call a capacitive sensor that uses electrical currents to map your finger and compared to you, a 2D face unlock, this is about 50 times more

secure

with false acceptance estimation in the Apple's Touch ID at around the 0.002% mark, which is actually the minimum recommended security level for authenticating payments, but then going up another level, you have Face ID which puts 30,000 dots on your face and then uses infrared . sensor to detect contours in three dimensions, this takes that number and multiplies it by another twenty, which brings it to that magic number of one in a million or 0.0001 percent, exactly the same as the iPhone pin, but in fact, the really interesting thing is if you have a rooted Android device and are willing to make some adjustments, you can set up a four by four grid, a five by five grid or even a six by six, obviously not a solution convenient, but this whole video is just a bit of fun, it is quite theoretical and this would explain eventually increasing your security and would move the potential number of patterns to vary approximately millions with a 4x4, tens of millions for a 5x5 and hundreds of millions for a 6x6, making it the hardest security to crack with a 6x6. grid, the probability of a successful attempt is less than zero dot zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent.

This might make biometric technology seem quite disappointing in comparison, but there are two key things to keep in mind: number one, the same person, say, a thief. UNIX, your phone can try multiple patterns, but if it happens that your face is different from yours and a fingerprint looks nothing like yours, then they have virtually zero chance of getting in biometrically, no matter how many times they try to number. The second is that all of these methods are actually safe enough that your main concern is not that someone can actually overcome them, but rather that someone will find a way around them.

Your PIN could be as complex as you want, but it won't matter if a thief has software that can bypass the security, so what are the takeaways? All unlocking methods are safe as long as you configure them correctly. B, if you are using a pin, avoid using a string of zeros. and if you're following a pattern, stay away from conventional shapes and letters and definitely don't use an L C. Fingerprint and face scanners are faster than entering a pin or pattern, so it's not exactly a surprise that This is what we're gravitating towards and D next-generation ultrasonic fingerprint scanners are just around the corner for many people and with this they will be an order of magnitude better at rejecting false attempts as they move from 2D scanning to 3D scanning.

If you enjoyed this video, it means a lot to me if you could hit the subscribe button below and as always, my name is Aaron, this is mr. Who's the boss? I won't catch you next time.