Signing in to websites with SSH

Have you ever used that? The user experience is horrible. Here [1] are a few more reasons why client certificate right now are just plain bad.

[1] http://www.browserauth.net/tls-client-authentication

So why are people trying to replace the algorithm, when what we need to do is to replace the UX? Patches could be submitted for both Chromium and Firefox to give them a better client-cert flow, but I don't see anyone working on the problem; just a constant parade of restyling on tab-strip and toolbar and notification banner UX.

I mean, ideally, a client cert would be treated pretty much exactly like a cookie: generated on first connection to a website and automatically stored by the client; synced across browsers; etc.

And, I mean, you could treat a client cert like a permanently logged-in account credential, but it'd be much better to just treat it as essentially an unforgeable browser fingerprint+session ID: something that just "pairs" the client and the server, but where you still have to log in after that pairing process, but only once. (As long as the cert gets synced to another browser, that browser is now logged into the site, because it's now sending the fingerprint of a "session" that's logged into the site.)

With such a setup, you would be able to just "clear" the client cert (like a cookie) to log out, and then get issued a new one and log in again on that one, if you wanted. You wouldn't have to worry about losing your cert. You'd be able to have multiple devices with multiple client certs that are each separately logged into the same account, if you wanted. But, since each client cert would be associated with an account, and vice-versa, you'd be able to revoke a client cert's access to a particular account: to, effectively, log another device out remotely.

The nice thing about this workflow, actually, is that each and every HTTPS site could always issue each visitor a client cert, just as we currently generate server-side session IDs for each visitor. It'd become a best practice to have client cert issuance on by default at the load-balancer level, like HSTS is now. (And load balancers can just translate client certs into a plaintext "browser fingerprint hash" HTTP header, that can be detected by anything further along the request chain that currently knows how to deal with cookie or URL session IDs.)

I've worked in support of computing clusters that are widely used by researchers. By far the most common problem people had with using these systems was grokking ssh keys. Masters and PhD Computer Science people are routinely baffled by them, provide their private keys instead of their public keys, or provide both, etc.

People in general just don't get public/private key pairs. Any solution that requires any awareness or handling of the keys by the user is a non-starter. Sorry to sound negative but after a couple of decades of observation I'm convinced this will never change.

Because client certificates have been around for donkeys years and almost nobody uses them. Even technical people!

But technical people do use ssh keys.

I may be missing something but this seems highly susceptible to man in the middle attacks