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The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

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Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#131

Post by yencabulator »

quesera wrote: post #97
jrochkind1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a bunch of copies of my house key, including one at a neighbors house and one in a realtor-style lockbox in my back yard. If I somehow lose all of them, I can still call a locksmith who can re-key my locks for maybe $300ish. There is no conceivable circumstance in which losing my key(s), no matter how badly I mess up, even if I only had one copy and threw it in the ocean in a fit of rage, will permanently deny…

> and one in a realtor-style lockbox in my back yard FWIW be sure to assign proper expectations of security to those lockboxes, i.e. very very low. I make a hobby of defeating them at friends' houses. Takes a few minutes. The last time I sold a house, I brought the lockbox to the closing to hand to my real estate agent. He was perplexed.

Most houses aren't all that burglar proof anyway. I personally really don't care about the quality of my locks, since they're installed on a glass door...

Previously, in Northern Europe, I had a condo where the door+lock manufacturers literally cautioned you that the fire department cannot force a quick entry in case of emergency. Think bolts on hinge side of door, etc.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#132

Post by lll-o-lll »

donmcronald wrote: post #127
lll-o-lll wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passkey is a concept that even the majority of tech enthusiasts seem not to have groked as of today. The thing that google/Apple have brought to the table is cloud backup of your private keys (yes, you should have lots of questions about how that is managed). This should enable disaster recovery/device transition for people using a phone as one of their passkeys. You’d probably add a fingerprint from your laptop for…

> The thing that google/Apple have brought to the table is cloud backup of your private keys (yes, you should have lots of questions about how that is managed). Absolutely. I keep my BitLocker keys in my Microsoft account because it's a simple solution that provides good enough security for me. If someone wants access to my data they have to get the key and my disk. I understand it and I'm satisfied with how it works…

Apple, as an example, promise that your keys are end-to-end encrypted and not viewable by Apple themselves. https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT213305#:~:text=Recovery%20....

Should you trust Apple? Is this secure enough if a password can still be used that recovers all these keys?

Ultimately there is always a convenience/security trade-off. The “passkey” concept has it right for the 99% of users case (in my opinion). For that 1%, it’s still WebAuthn, so nothing stops you from using a Yubikey with a second safe-held Yubikey for disaster recovery.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#133

Post by dvzk »

donmcronald wrote: post #125
dvzk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passkey objects on macOS are encrypted at rest within the iCloud Keychain sqlite database in Library/Keychains/*/. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the keychain extraction tools that exist. I don't know why you would want to though. Since (1) passkeys will rarely be a required nonreissuable credential, and (2) losing access to iCloud Keychain is extremely improbable. For many users, showing ID to a phone store clerk…

> Passkey objects on macOS are encrypted at rest within the iCloud Keychain sqlite database in Library/Keychains/*/. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the keychain extraction tools that exist. Really? That sounds awful. So now everything is passwordless and tied to a single database that can be stolen? I thought the whole point of passkey was to tie the login to a TPM, Secure Enclave, HSM, etc. managed key because th…

Sorry, that's only speculation, since I haven't had more time to analyze the database. If you read Apple's passkey security document, it claims that passkeys are distributed identically across devices. And that you can recover the passkeys even in the event that all associated devices are lost. It's also possible to share passkeys at any time.

passkeys.com:

> When a user sets up a passkey, a key is generated and synchronized to the cloud. When the user connects from another device in the same ecosystem, it will use the same key.

WebAuthn supports verified attestations for hardware-backed authenticators. Passkeys seem to be designed for normal consumers, who worry about losing authenticator devices.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#134

Post by Ajedi32 »

donmcronald wrote: post #130
Ajedi32 wrote: post #102

It seems like most people commenting here don't know what passkeys are. I'm seeing a lot of complaints about things that simply aren't a problem with Passkeys, only with plain WebAuthn. Passkeys are based on WebAuthn, but they are not the same from a user experience perspective. The simplest way to describe Passkeys would be "WebAuthn, but with the keys stored in a password manager instead of being tied to a specific…

> Many implementations don't allow the key database to be exported or transferred to a different Passkey client. That's an issue with those implementations though, not an inherent problem with the protocol. I don't get it. As soon as a key database can be exported, that means it can be stolen, doesn't it? How is Passkey so much better than a password manager with a good implementation that it warrants all the added c…

> How is Passkey so much better than a password manager with a good implementation

Because:

1. Passkeys have better UX, on account of them being able to interface with websites through a standard API rather than through text boxes.

2. Password managers are incapable of eliminating user-memorized passwords, again on account of them interfacing with sites through text boxes designed to facilitate that particular insecure practice.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#135

Post by eep_social »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #128
eep_social wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and I don’t use that except where it’s unavoidable (wifi passwords) because apple cannot be trusted any more than any other public company.

Use a different Passkey client then. This is like complaining that the "entire concept" of password managers is "a non-starter" because you don't like Lastpass.

Indeed I do not like LastPass and I have taken my business elsewhere. But it’s not on me to sell myself a passkey solution, it’s on the snobby folks like you who are so sure it’s obviously better. And I’ll repeat my previous comment: you all are doing a piss poor job of explaining that to the rest of the world who aren’t going to get on board. Betamax was better, VHS won.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#136

Post by dvzk »

donmcronald wrote: post #129
dvzk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like 99% of people in this thread, you are conflating distributed non-device-bound credentials (passkeys) with hardware security keys.

> distributed non-device-bound credentials If they can be distributed they can be stolen, right? I don't see how it's any better than a password manager at that point.

Yes. Depending on the threat model, it may or may not be better. Many organizations won't be allowing remote passkey sign-in for employees. For people at home, the elimination of passwords will reduce rates of phishing and credential-stuffing attacks.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#137

Post by lll-o-lll »

GTP wrote: post #95
Semaphor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but you need to add all those secrets to your backup key. So you need to get it out every time you register somewhere.

I have to admit that I don't own an hardware security key. But since those let you use public key cryptography to login, you could at least theoretically use the same public key for multiple services. Whether the FIDO2 protocol lets you do that or not, I admit I don't know.

It doesn’t, which would make disaster recovery a huge pain. You would have to register your backup key for every account you have.

The Apple/google “passkey” approach lets you use WebAuthn while having encrypted, cloud stored, private key escrow. It is much more convenient. Obviously with the downsides that implies.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#138

Post by insomniacity »

tzs wrote: post #104
jeroenhd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard mantra for physical key-based 2FA has always been "register two keys and keep one in a safe", which seems doable for important accounts (like banks and government stuff) but no way am I going to get a key out of my safe when I want to order a replacement part on JoesDiscountDishwasherParts.biz. I really wish there was a way to register your backup key through your primary key. Luckily, FIDO2 can fix a lo…

> Having a business where you can go to a physical office and show up with ID so you can get your account back would solve this problem. I've wanted something similar, combined with a tree approach to account recovery where the effort for recovery can vary depending on the importance of the account. Say I lose access to my McDonald's account. That's not a very important account. It just contains some reward points th…

I’ve wanted to build something very similar for quite a while. Mind dropping me an email?

ic@fastmail-co-uk

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#139

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

jeroenhd wrote: post #33
_448 wrote: post #29

Oh, what could go wrong! Why is there no discussion on users losing their private keys? Ask all those cryptocurrency users who lost their private keys. Now don't tell that there are crypto wallets/vaults that manage private keys; there are many ways key can be lost even when using wallets/vaults. We engineers live in a different world, disconnected from the regular users who have no clue what public-private keys are!

The standard mantra for physical key-based 2FA has always been "register two keys and keep one in a safe", which seems doable for important accounts (like banks and government stuff) but no way am I going to get a key out of my safe when I want to order a replacement part on JoesDiscountDishwasherParts.biz. I really wish there was a way to register your backup key through your primary key. Luckily, FIDO2 can fix a lo…

Yubico has proffered a standard enhancement designed to enable FIDO keys to “automatically” enroll a paired backup when you enroll a primary key.

They wrote about it here in 2020: https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-proposes-webauthn-protoco...

I’m not clear on whether it has gained any traction, and it’s not something I see a lot of my peers in security aware of.

Re: The transition from logins to cryptographic passkeys is getting messy

#140

Post by Zababa »

tzs wrote: post #111
Zababa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My domain name is so important, since it is in the ultimate recovery path for so many descendant nodes, it would probably have at least two parent nodes (I didn't say anything about the tree having to be a binary tree). If your domain name can have multiple descendant nodes and multiple parent nodes, is that still a tree?

Probably not. I should have said directed acyclic graph. Actually I guess it doesn't even have to acyclic. You just need a directed graph where that has a non-empty set R of nodes such that (1) nodes in R do not have incoming edges, and (2) every node that has an incoming edge can be reached by some path that starts in R.

From what I can understand from the wikipedia page for the graph theory trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory), what I'm used to calling tree ("computer science trees"?) are rooted trees, and what you described could be called a tree.

Which kind of makes sense, because a tree has stuff that branches out at the top (the branches) and at the bottom (the roots). The trunk has multiple parents and multiple children.

Definitions aside, I like your idea a lot. I feel like it's one of the few propositions that recognizes how important proving your identity already is, and how it will only become more important. The system is flexible and makes sense. It's the kind of thing that I think most people could understand, and thus use.

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