On the yubikey analogy, you forget one important detail: you leave copies of your fingerprints (good enough to unlock your phone) on everything that you touch, everywhere you go - doors, door handles, cutlery, cups and bottles, furniture, stationery, push-buttons and so on. That's not the case with a yubikey, which is by design protected against cloning, unintentional as well as deliberate.

Also, fingerprints can be covertly photographed using a fairly basic camera, while the yubikey content, once again, is locked inside a secure chip inside the device.

So, if your friend uses a fingerprint only, you can take a few photos of the friend's fingers, or just take him to lunch.

You don't need to take my word for any of this - just give it an honest try. During a normal weekday, monitor the times you have left a fingerprint in a place where it can be easily retrieved by a stalker. You'll be surprised.

And I hope you were joking about the small cut :) Wouldn't suggest you give THAT an honest try.

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Fair point although I doubt you can easily reconstruct a valid fingerprint from marks and photos but I admit I can be wrong.

>And I hope you were joking about the small cut

It's real:

https://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/projects/fingerprint_alteration.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20120718025941/http://www.scafo.org/library/120604.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20120910123640/http://www.forensic-medecine.info/fingerprints.html

they could forcefully take ur fingerprint, but you can forget your password 😉