If only Microsoft hadn't chosen to use the code-name Hailstorm for its authentication proposal back in the days (and generally had a better image and a more open approach etc). Would have alleviated a lot of the pain earlier.
Hailstorm wasn't really the same thing. It positioned Microsoft as a centralized identity provider, with MS holding all the user data and everyone else just connecting to proprietary Microsoft online services to check if the user was who they said they were. Kind of like Facebook Login, but built around 2000s-era-trendy technologies like XML and SOAP instead of JavaScript and JSON. It's hard to see how Hailstorm woul…
W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
131–140 of 154 posts
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're being downvoted because the comment isn't really adding anything to the discussion because its so short. What Brian_K_White is referring to is SQRL by Steve Gibson from GRC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL . Its an alternative simpler secure protocol that has been in development for a few years that is frequently discussed on the Security Now podcast.
Steve Gibson has been promoting his solution for years but as far as I'm aware security professionals have yet to see it as a serious alternative.
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're being downvoted because the comment isn't really adding anything to the discussion because its so short. What Brian_K_White is referring to is SQRL by Steve Gibson from GRC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL . Its an alternative simpler secure protocol that has been in development for a few years that is frequently discussed on the Security Now podcast.
Steve Gibson has been promoting his solution for years but as far as I'm aware security professionals have yet to see it as a serious alternative.
If site A is protected by SQRL, and I'm a bad guy, I can just live phish sign-ins for site A using SQRL from my phishing site, site B. The users all believe (as with other phishing attacks) that they're being asked for credentials by a legitimate site and so they provide them with SQRL, and I'm in.
This (very common and fully automatable) trick doens't work on WebAuthn, completely defeating phishing. This is because the fundamental idea in phishing is "Humans are idiots, fool the human into mistaking site A for site B". In WebAuthn the credentials are mechanically derived from the site you're on, so for site A they will always be site A credentials, and for site B, site B credentials. Convincing page design, an urgent email "from the boss", clever use of IDNs to fake the URL, those fool the human but not the machine, and the human is taken out of the "what site is this?" decision by WebAuthn.
But the human is left _in_ the loop in another way that leverages our strengths. WebAuthn requires a physical interaction, typically a button press by the human. So a hypothetical attack that takes say, 50 million authentications, cannot work because the human will not press the button 50 million times while you do the attack. They'll get sick of it and go on Twitter to moan instead.
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#134I don't want to let the password go. It gives me the freedom to rightfully access my service if I just know the secret, without any entanglent to some app, device, or other account.
Sure if one is minimalism (using a few services) Once a storage needed (load of brain, password manager, paper etc.), the "just" goes away.
> without any entanglent to some app, device
Again If said storage needed, this is not advantage anymore.
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#135I don't want to let the password go. It gives me the freedom to rightfully access my service if I just know the secret, without any entanglent to some app, device, or other account.
I've avoided getting a Yubikey because there's not an easy way to use it on my iPhone, sticking with TOTP. But that's a bit of an edge case. (iPhones lack NFC chips)
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#136I think fundamentally most users don't understand anything more complicated than passwords. Passwords are easy. They make sense. A kindergartener understands the idea of a secret word that only they know. Tokens, certificates, FIDO -- it's black magic. Therefore people don't trust it. It has to be as easy and intuitive as passwords or it's a non-starter. That's why the SMS codes (though insecure) are so popular. Peop…
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from the awful UX of client certs, which we could imagine being fixed, FIDO tokens are very narrowly conceived to solve the exact second factor problem - and nothing else. If you do client certs you've got this whole identity thing baked into the certs. But the FIDO token doesn't have an identity, it only knows how to prove it's still the same FIDO token you had before. So that's immediately much better. If I u…
> FIDO tokens are very narrowly conceived to solve the exact second factor problem - and nothing else. Well, just that has been done completely flawlessly by smartcards for two decades already. Introducing a competing standard may just end with neither of them getting enough support.
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#138Almost there; now we just need some cross-platform implementations with synced credentials, and support from a couple major sites. Ideally some password managers will step in and implement support, and Google will add support to their own login flow as a primary authentication factor.
Eventually, instead of your password manager having a billion passwords, one per site, it'll just consist of one cryptographic key.
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I just say I detest magic link emails that don't offer me a way to just use my password manager?
How would a magic link email be used with a password manager?
Re: W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins
#140Does anyone else find these informal specifications difficult to digest? The informative appendices link to papers on TPM and the like but it's hard to find a formal description of the protocol, or at least the sensitive parts, that could be independently validated or verified. Has there been any work to formally verify/validate the design of this protocol that I'm not seeing?
What do you mean? https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/ includes formal specifications.