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Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#91
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are using passwords that you can remember without your phone then I assume it's pretty basic and insecure.

Presenting this as a choice between using Apple's closed solution or using easy-to-remember passwords is disingenuous. Please don't participate in the discussion if you're going to be this bad faith.

It's especially ironic given that what Apple has implemented is literally an existing web standard. Luckily web apps supporting WebAuthn should also be able to support alternative means of authentication so they don't break when you don't have your device with you.

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#92
post #71
post #70

I feel we're powerless to stop this, since it's an extremely easy sell to normal users. The average iPhone user wouldn't think once, let alone twice, about clicking OK on that shiny new doodad-app, and that's all the critical mass they need. Even if they _were_ to think twice, what are the feasible alternatives? A password manager where you generate passwords for each account? Sure, I do that, you probably do that, b…

> Am I freaking out unnecessarily? Is my reasoning flawed? Yes, very much so. I don't know about Apple's thing specifically, but WebAuthn is decentralized and open. Basically how it works is that you have a private key and use that to log in to a site, no other servers or anything else required. I don't know what Apple's implementation specifically has changed, but if it's based on WebAuthn, it can't be much. Overall…

Isn't it the case that this key is stored in your Keychain though? Keychain data lives on Apple's servers, no?

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#93
post #92
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I freaking out unnecessarily? Is my reasoning flawed? Yes, very much so. I don't know about Apple's thing specifically, but WebAuthn is decentralized and open. Basically how it works is that you have a private key and use that to log in to a site, no other servers or anything else required. I don't know what Apple's implementation specifically has changed, but if it's based on WebAuthn, it can't be much. Overall…

Isn't it the case that this key is stored in your Keychain though? Keychain data lives on Apple's servers, no?

I'm not sure where this specific key is (in Apple's implementation), but WebAuthn doesn't care where the key lives. Mine is in a Yubikey, I think/hope that will work, if the implementation is "plain" WebAuthn.

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#94
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on Webauthn and other FIDO standards. Private keys can't be exported (because it would defeat some of the features of a "secure enclave"), but other keys can be added to keychains. You should be able to migrate between devices/device-types across the Webauthn and FIDO standards. It's still early days that some of that isn't easy or "complete" yet, but the standards are being built and Apple and Google and…

I am not sure I understand the nuance between exporting a key and migrating the key between devices. Surely if you can do one you can do the other (at least technically/in term of security).

I don't currently know the specifics of the standards, but often key migration means signing and publicly announcing a new device's hardware public key and optionally revoking an older device's hardware public key. The private keys themselves might never leave the hardware secure enclaves (and/or other key escrow services) to do the dance of updating a keychain of public key signatures. The big "advances" in the standards over the last few years have been about moving away from the "classic" PGP/CA style PKI assumption that a user is represented by a single strong key and a hierarchy of owned subkeys and more that a user is represented by a keychain of N keys many more roughly "peers" than hierarchical and in something of a web of trust with each other where N is at least the number of devices the user owns and regularly uses, and often much more than that with various key escrow strategies. I believe the "PassKey" approach uses an escrowed sub-key per-website in many cases so the keychain gets conceptually huge. (Escrowed here is that it is a derived key using data available to some quorum of physical device keys. You can rederive escrowed keys, but you can't export physical device keys that made the escrow data in the first place. You should be able to add new device keys that can share in a quorum to get at that data, but it's a migration dance.)

To my knowledge Keybase's breakdowns of how their keychain worked, including subkey escrow and key exchanges are still some of the easiest to read on the subject of how the math works, though I don't think Keybase's "standards" entirely resemble some of the details of the final standards from FIDO, but again I also don't know enough of the specifics of FIDO's standards as I'd like.

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#95

Passkeys are designed to take away further control from you and that is why BigTech are promoting it. Do you really want to tie your digital life to a device?

> Do you really want to tie your digital life to a device? Already true for many people. There will be passwordless alternatives given that BitWarden is investing in the tech[1] . [1] https://bitwarden.com/blog/accelerating-value-for-bitwarden-...

> There’s no shortage of security people who will tell you that passwords are broken. It’s also not a coincidence how many of them sell products to supplement or replace passwords. (Microsoft Ruined Passwords, Now Aims for a Passwordless Future: https://puri.sm/posts/microsoft-ruined-passwords-now-aims-fo... ).

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#96
post #70

I feel we're powerless to stop this, since it's an extremely easy sell to normal users. The average iPhone user wouldn't think once, let alone twice, about clicking OK on that shiny new doodad-app, and that's all the critical mass they need. Even if they _were_ to think twice, what are the feasible alternatives? A password manager where you generate passwords for each account? Sure, I do that, you probably do that, b…

I agree we won't be able to stop it, but on the up side I think that it will reach a critical mass and apple will get forced to make it interoperable with other platforms.

But between introduction of this feature anf it becoming Cross-Platform, years will go by...

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#98
post #93
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the case that this key is stored in your Keychain though? Keychain data lives on Apple's servers, no?

I'm not sure where this specific key is (in Apple's implementation), but WebAuthn doesn't care where the key lives. Mine is in a Yubikey, I think/hope that will work, if the implementation is "plain" WebAuthn.

I'm not sure either, but going on how Apple implementations that I _do_ know about, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it won't be something you can directly control, like a Yubikey.

Re: Apple’s Killing the Password. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

#99
post #98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where this specific key is (in Apple's implementation), but WebAuthn doesn't care where the key lives. Mine is in a Yubikey, I think/hope that will work, if the implementation is "plain" WebAuthn.

I'm not sure either, but going on how Apple implementations that I _do_ know about, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it won't be something you can directly control, like a Yubikey.

I hope not, given that Apple was one of the WebAuthn supporters, but I can't say I don't somewhat share your concerns.
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