101–110 of 218 posts
Can someone remind me why we don't use public key cryptography for authentication on websites?
It looks like there's a W3C draft "in the works" but I'm concerned since almost half the editors work for the two companies trying to pass this proprietary Azure/AD vendor lock-in nonsense. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR-webauthn-20180320
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Unless you're asserting that the hardware token is just as crackable as a password, it's not a 1:1 replacement. The problem with passwords is that you have 10,000 users and more than one of them has a bad password. The problem with hardware tokens is that I've stolen your token. So passwords are vulnerable to bots, while the hardware token requires a human to find/steal something and connect it with a specific accoun…
> Unless you're asserting that the hardware token is just as crackable as a password That's completely outside the scope of what I was describing. You've taken my words out of context.
The conversation here is blowing my mind. People are actually worried that their yubikey might get lost or stolen when likely most of your passwords are already all over the internet. I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password. Twitter! Not Joe's Auto-Body who's website is being run by a high-schooler, but one of the pioneers of internet companies. They messed up. Your pass…
so basically to defend against password hacking they want to use FIDO/yubikeys. Too bad if something like twitter happens your yubikey is probably useless after it would've prolly logged anything to their servers. P.S.: it's possible to change passwords, but hardware keys need to be destroyed and changed. Also Yubikeys can also have bugs. https://www.yubico.com/2017/10/infineon-rsa-key-generation-i... So basically it…
Like krupan also points out, this is flat out incorrect. The FIDO2 protocols are designed so that such a failure case is not possible, for two reasons. First, no secrets are shared - the server only sees _public_ keys and signatures. Second, a different public key is generated for each website - there is no globally correlatable identity.
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Um, if we use public key cryptography, the only thing websites can log or leak is your public key. Since it's public, that doesn't break anything.
accept that your public key is useless if twitter accidently logs challenges. or even worse your hardware is useless if key generation is too weak. or even more worse the protocol is so complex that chances are high that even implementations can contain bugs. or ... most engineers have trouble implementing simple logins with password. do you really think that having a complex system will be better?
No, this is also incorrect. That's not how public key cryptography works.
>your hardware is useless if key generation is too weak
This is true, which is why you choose an authenticator vendor that's widely trusted to make high quality hardware. If you don't trust Yubico, there are competitors.
>the protocol is so complex that chances are high that even implementations can contain bugs
This is only partly true - most of the complexity is in the browser and authenticator layers, and are implemented by cryptography experts in the browser teams and authenticator manufacturers. Almost all of the server layer complexity can be encapsulated in reusable open source libraries - app developers will only have to implement their business logic on top of it, just like they have to do for password authentication too.
>do you really think that having a complex system will be better?
It will eliminate the problems with phishing and password reuse. That is definitely better in my book.
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Um, if we use public key cryptography, the only thing websites can log or leak is your public key. Since it's public, that doesn't break anything.
accept that your public key is useless if twitter accidently logs challenges. or even worse your hardware is useless if key generation is too weak. or even more worse the protocol is so complex that chances are high that even implementations can contain bugs. or ... most engineers have trouble implementing simple logins with password. do you really think that having a complex system will be better?
The conversation here is blowing my mind. People are actually worried that their yubikey might get lost or stolen when likely most of your passwords are already all over the internet. I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password. Twitter! Not Joe's Auto-Body who's website is being run by a high-schooler, but one of the pioneers of internet companies. They messed up. Your pass…
> I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password Clearly you didn't read the email. The password was potentially logged to twitter's servers in plaintext. They have no evidence anyone collected those passwords, but various employees could, in theory, have seen those logs. Presumably those logs are now all deleted. Even if you didn't reset your twitter password, it's very likely…
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azuresecurity/2015/10/19/an...
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I would expect things to be more secure in many cases. People are pretty good at keeping physical items somewhat safe and notice when they’re gone. Yubikeys cannot easily be cloned. The password cannot be attacked remotely. 2FA is certainly safer, though.
The standard in high-assurance applications is to present a PIN to the hardware token before it can be used, ideally through an out-of-band keypad. In this context, it would be reasonable to have the Yubikey require a PIN entry from the computer. You could use the same PIN for all sites because it stays local; the relying party never handles it, only the Yubikey.
My problem is that Microsoft doesn't allow swapping in and out of authentication plugins like PAM. I work primarily in a Windows shop, and I got the other co-workers in Linux because PAM supports seamless multi-factor auth. I would have went Windows, but its too obfuscated or hard to do that. LinOTP works very well. And LinOTP works with a wide variety of tokens. Don't be locked to a single vendor.
FWIW, that's not strictly true. See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt1...
I don't have enough experience to comment one way or the other about its difficulty.
Correct me if I am wrong, but passwordless login is a single-factor authentication and less secure than MFA. Depending on whenever hardware key is more or less secure than the password, the mass adoption of this could make things LESS secure.
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Except that passwords at least protect you if your hardware key is stolen. Using just a hardware key seems similarly risky to just using a password.
So in this case, arent the two factors a) physical possession of desktop/laptop and b) the Yubikey ? How likely is it you'll lose both if you keep your keyring with you?