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Passkeys and Modern Authentication

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Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#21

Post by karmarepellent »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #19
alphazard wrote: post #6

Unfortunately the tech community is full of people who pride themselves on being aware of and advocating for the latest standard put out by whatever company. That's how we end up with lots of complicated nonsense like most of what is sent in HTTP headers, or the contents of a TLS certificate. On the topic of authentication, it's solved. SSH nailed it, any further complexity is strictly worse . Signing up is uploading…

> Signing up is uploading a public key. Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel. How do I sign in from multiple computers?

A service that lets you sign up by uploading a SSH public key could just as well let you upload multiple public keys in your profile to be able to connect from other devices.

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#22

Post by bradley13 »

This. All of this. Passkeys are a great idea, but the walled gardens are a huge problem. Also, services placing additional requirements (e.g., attestations) that potentially violate your privacy and anonymity.

Just now, at least in Europe, there is a huge push to force users to authenticate themselves with their actual identity, even for ordinary Internet services. This is happening simultaneously in many countries (including non-EU countries like Switzerland). It almost has to be a coordinated effort....driven by whom? Passkeys play into this.

Call me paranoid...

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#23

Post by tadfisher »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #8
bmandale wrote: post #2

> An attempt by an open source password manager to provide export of private keys was ruled insecure and should not be supported. The name of the issue reveals the actual problem: "should never be exported in clear text". If the export was encrypted with a passphrase in a standard format, then there would be no issue. It's specifically doing it in plain text that causes consternation. Of course, in practice it doesn'…

But requiring exports to be encrypted is the least one can do to maintain a degree of security while still allowing exports. Why is the protocol dictating the user's security model? I can see why particular applications wouldn't choose to support insecure exports (and would even agree with that), but I genuinely don't understand why the protocol is dictating that an application can't allow users the freedom to choose…

The other side of this is the Relying Party, a.k.a. the website operator that is relying on the user's password manager to be decently secure and resistant to phishing. Otherwise, why ditch passwords plus 2FA?

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#24

Post by alphazard »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #19
alphazard wrote: post #6

Unfortunately the tech community is full of people who pride themselves on being aware of and advocating for the latest standard put out by whatever company. That's how we end up with lots of complicated nonsense like most of what is sent in HTTP headers, or the contents of a TLS certificate. On the topic of authentication, it's solved. SSH nailed it, any further complexity is strictly worse . Signing up is uploading…

> Signing up is uploading a public key. Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel. How do I sign in from multiple computers?

There are multiple solutions to this, with tradeoffs. Doesn't change the fact that the service should only want a public key, and you should only give the service a public key. That's where this new complexity is being forced on users and developers. You need to be able to sign in, or let your users sign in, but you can choose how complicated of a key management strategy to have.

You can either have 1 key pair per service and sync them with something like 1password. Or you can have 1 key per service per device. Keys that never leave the device is usually considered more secure (and I agree for what I consider my threat model to be).

Important services like primary email, your bank, or cloud platform should probably do 1 key per device. Everything else benefits from the simplicity of 1 key per service with the keys synced.

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#25

Post by tadfisher »

karmarepellent wrote: post #21
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signing up is uploading a public key. Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel. How do I sign in from multiple computers?

A service that lets you sign up by uploading a SSH public key could just as well let you upload multiple public keys in your profile to be able to connect from other devices.

Amazing, just like passkeys!

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#26

Post by Dr4kn »

dan-robertson wrote: post #20

> Obviously, one could pay for an authenticator like 1Password, which at least is ecosystem independent. However, not everybody is in a situation where they can afford to pay for basic services like password managers This argument was made in the context of moving out of the Apple ecosystem (are there other ecosystems one would want to leave where the only option is paying for something like 1password?). I don’t real…

There is also keepass, which you can sync with whatever free cloud storage you want. It might not be the nicest password manager you can use, but you can always use it for free.

Bitwardens free tier is also generous enough that a lot of people won't have to pay

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#27

Post by agwa »

alphazard wrote: post #6

Unfortunately the tech community is full of people who pride themselves on being aware of and advocating for the latest standard put out by whatever company. That's how we end up with lots of complicated nonsense like most of what is sent in HTTP headers, or the contents of a TLS certificate. On the topic of authentication, it's solved. SSH nailed it, any further complexity is strictly worse . Signing up is uploading…

The simplicity of SSH's public key authentication comes with a significant privacy downside: https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/whoarethey https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/

This isn't such a big deal in the SSH ecosystem, but it would be a disaster on the Web where there is an enormous incentive to track users. Part of WebAuthn's complexity comes from addressing that.

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#28

Post by karmarepellent »

tadfisher wrote: post #25
karmarepellent wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A service that lets you sign up by uploading a SSH public key could just as well let you upload multiple public keys in your profile to be able to connect from other devices.

Amazing, just like passkeys!

The sarcasm is duly noted. But I simply answered the question. I don't have any strong opinion regarding passkeys.

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#29

Post by dan-robertson »

What do security professionals think about passkeys? In particular, those who were not involved in designing them. Lots of the arguments in this article feel very much like the sort of thing one would expect from someone into open source (not saying they are wrong, and I think they are well explained here) but I feel they will inevitably be the product of different concerns than those a security practitioner might have.

Re: Passkeys and Modern Authentication

#30

Post by tuckerman »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #12
seany wrote: post #7

Exporting passkeys is the single required feature for me to start using them more. The "anti phishing" push has really gotten a little too crazy. It seems mostly related to our legal inability to push security responsibility onto consumers.

Given that you don't strictly need to have one passkey per site, is this desire to move passkeys around a holdover from wanting to "export" your passwords? Because if you can export them, an exploit can too. I find passkeys rather more interesting when they cannot be exported from a HSM / key enclave / yubikey, but of course I need to be able to register multiple yubikeys per site, and a few of my accounts didn't all…

Export is a good check against lock in. I just went through my password manager and I have 60 passkeys. It would be a huge pain if I have to switch to a different password manager and there isn't export/import.
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