Live data from Hacker News

Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

webkit.org

21–30 of 371 posts

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#21
post #13

So happy Apple decided to go with an open standard here rather than something proprietary. This is good news for the FIDO2 ecosystem and I hope this leads to far greater support for FIDO2 authenticators of all types. There is another world in which Apple just pushed 'Sign in with Apple' and created yet another federated identity provider rather than true, 'secure element'-based FIDO2 authentication.

I dunno. I mean, I do, it feels good. But it also is a very different kind of FIDO2 than what we've seen before. In a way that FIDO was designed for, that we hoped would happen. But it's still not entirely joy & mirth that we're here for me.

It feels like a little like the first day we start to understand how "Big Tent" (in the OpenStack sense) FIDO2 ecosystem is. You can do whatever, make anything, and call it FIDO2; it's all duck typing: looks like a duck, quacks must be a duck. No implementation details are required, no transparency is needed, everything can be totally vendored way way up, and the standard will welcome you. Your platform is welcome here. This post is about how to use & prefer that platform, over the more common means available.

For sure this is overwhelmingly a good thing. It's by design that we allow platform authenticators in WebAuthn. Apple is allowing their closed, proprietary security technologies to seamlessly work on the web without making webdevs jump through hoops. It's a good thing, and this will really help Web Authentication for sure.

Still I have some wistfulness. It's a good user experience, it's great. It's a win for devs, it's a win for users. Still there's some larger context I can't quite put my finger on, when I see "authenticatorSelection: { authenticatorAttachment: "platform" }". The web is letting more of the native platform shine through, and that's good, but it also forgoes some of the knowability & commonality that resounds on so much of the rest of the web, and while the immediate impact is extremely good, I still think there's some kind of hard to describe ultra-slow-motion civilization-scale loss that's also passenger to this successful commingling of web and platform.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#28
These all seem to be examples that use faceID/touchID as a password. That’s not what biometrics should be though, they should be the username. I hope that this is supported as a flow as well. Identify who you are with biometrics, and prove your access with a correlated password.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#29

I'm curious about "Apple Anonymous Attestation". Is Apple taking on any liability by providing this service or is this all done on hardware through private APIs?

It is only for Apple Devices, and all it does is allow them to easily disable attestation and thus (is this device used for auth secure) for a singular TouchID/FaceID.

Instead of with Yubikey where if the attestation key is compromised, and it is blacklisted, they disable every single last device manufactured with said attestation key.

Re: Face ID and Touch ID for the Web

#30

I'm curious about "Apple Anonymous Attestation". Is Apple taking on any liability by providing this service or is this all done on hardware through private APIs?

Attestation is just a technical term in the WebAuthn API. Different authenticators can use different attestation data formats. Apple rolled their own, hence the name.
Post reply on HN