Show HN: Kryptonite – a new home for your SSH private key

Post by plange » Mon, May 01, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #46

shmel wrote: post #33

It sounds very hipster and all, but how is a phone more trustworthy than a Linux PC? Cool, we don't need to trust a PC, now we have to trust a phone and pretend that malware for smartphones don't exist at all. Hardware USB token looks much better as its attack surface is so much smaller than iOS/Android.

* Every application on the phone is sandboxed. * The disk is encrypted by default, and the OS is aggressive about keeping it encrypted ; a booted-up computer is almost always decrypted. * The language runtimes on the phone are hardened. * The phone's kernel, in addition to being more important attack surface than the Linux kernel (because of the jailbreak market, among other things), is auto-updated. * The phone's us…

Post by 4kevinking » Mon, May 01, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #48

4kevinking wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) We are planning to support multiple private keys, but currently only support a single key pair. 2) Android doesn't yet support ed25519 but it is coming. 3) We would consider something like this but the question is how that checksum test itself is served. We'll definitely look into improving this. The curl script itself does check the hashes of the installed binaries downloaded from github.

Multiple private keys are more important than you might think, because Github won't let you use the same key in more than one account, so everyone who has more than one Github account and wants hardware tokens has to have multiple hardware tokens.

Post by dolmen » Mon, May 01, 2017, 9:51 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #48

4kevinking wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) We are planning to support multiple private keys, but currently only support a single key pair. 2) Android doesn't yet support ed25519 but it is coming. 3) We would consider something like this but the question is how that checksum test itself is served. We'll definitely look into improving this. The curl script itself does check the hashes of the installed binaries downloaded from github.

Multiple private keys are more important than you might think, because Github won't let you use the same key in more than one account, so everyone who has more than one Github account and wants hardware tokens has to have multiple hardware tokens.

Post by plange » Mon, May 01, 2017, 10:13 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #54

tptacek wrote: post #47

I haven't reviewed the implementation, but this is a really good idea. I want one.

I will likely end up using this in personal capacity, and would also appreciate if the UX of using Google Authenticator were more similar to this, rather than requiring me to screenscrape my phone with my eyeball and then type information into another device (or, more painfully, another window on the same phone). The easiest way to do that probably results in a callback to Big Daddy G every time I access anything sen…

Post by packetized » Mon, May 01, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

4kevinking wrote: post #35

shmel wrote: post #33

It sounds very hipster and all, but how is a phone more trustworthy than a Linux PC? Cool, we don't need to trust a PC, now we have to trust a phone and pretend that malware for smartphones don't exist at all. Hardware USB token looks much better as its attack surface is so much smaller than iOS/Android.

The attack surface may seem smaller for USB tokens, but storing the pin for say a Yubikey allows malware to use the key without restriction. Also, these USB devices don't have a UI, so you never know what you are actually approving, i.e. which username or server you are logging into.