Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have not had augmented PAKEs that were widely trusted by the cryptographic engineering community for decades. OPAQUE was 2018. The adoption you're looking for hasn't happened for a bunch of reasons, including: * The industry's (reasonable) emphasis on moving people away from passwords altogether, and towards phishing-proof authentication. * The fact that we'd have to do new underlying protocol work to meaningfully…
My Google account is indeed protected with Yubikeys and so on. Years after I bought my first Security Key, I can name all the places I use it, whereas if I type 'pass' the list goes on for several screens. But while it's true that OPAQUE is what you might choose today, SRP is much older. We didn't have AES in 1995, we certainly didn't have a workable AEAD but instead of waiting for 21st century technology Netscape sh…
But cryptographers did not generally like SRP. Lots of cryptographers had misgivings about it. It is not surprising to me that SRP didn't get usefully baked into the web.
This "HTTP is designed with an authentication layer" stuff is a very old argument on HN. There are two sides to it. The other side is: baking stuff directly into the protocol makes us path-dependent on what we decide to add (see: every protocol ever designed), and if we were path dependent on 2002-era cryptography, that would be a very bad thing. Authentication is a complicated problem and people's needs differ.
I respect the take, the same way I enjoy reading Gutmann even though I agree with only like 50% of what he says.