As someone who is comfortable with TOTP but hasn't tried FIDO-/Yubikey-style devices, I have a few questions: - Are drivers for this already installed as part of desktop Ubuntu 20.10/Windows 10? Any driver installation will absolutely make this a no-go for family members. - Is additional software required for anything non-techies might reasonably want to do with this device, including resetting it, adding an entry or…
Others have answered most of your questions, but there's something I think deserves emphasizing: In general, you cannot (by design) back up these devices; if you could, that would defeat a lot of the security they provide. That means that if you lose it, you will have to find a way to get 2FA disabled for each and every account you enabled it for. Some orgs will have pretty onerous (but necessary!) processes for doin…
FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
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Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#62Nice, I'd love this as an open source yubikey replacement. But it doesn't do OpenPGP, I rely on that way too much sadly. Not just for SSH which supports fido2 now but also for file encryption and my password manager. If they add that in the future I might jump ship.
We hope and think that PIV can replace all the practical use cases for PGP. Specifically among those mentioned, `age` for file encryption, and either FIDO resident keys with hmac-secret for password managers, or something like `passage` (fork of `pass` using, again, `age` for encryption). For SSH you can use FIDO for newer OpenSSH, and either `pivy` or `yubikey-agent` via PIV. Cheers!
People like to dislike PGP and replace it with a myriad of different solutions. But PGP is everywhere and awesome. It's very wide spread adoption is invaluable. I really don't want to see it replaced with zillions of different bespoke solutions.
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#63As someone who's not familiar with U2F or comparable standards I have a general question about the topic: When registering a key for multiple accounts (at the same site or at different sites) can website owners link those accounts by some common "key ID"? In the sense of: "Oh, this is Bob's key so this account must belong to Bob".
No, they cannot. This is an explicit design goal of FIDO ( https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-security-requirements/fi... ). The actual public key used for logging in to a specific site is completely random. Optionally, the website can ask for "attestation", which is intended to prove that the public key is from a specific vendor/model. To make this also unlinkable, devices are supposed to share attestation keys in…
I'm not so sure they cannot associate.
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
We hope and think that PIV can replace all the practical use cases for PGP. Specifically among those mentioned, `age` for file encryption, and either FIDO resident keys with hmac-secret for password managers, or something like `passage` (fork of `pass` using, again, `age` for encryption). For SSH you can use FIDO for newer OpenSSH, and either `pivy` or `yubikey-agent` via PIV. Cheers!
What about code signing? People like to dislike PGP and replace it with a myriad of different solutions. But PGP is everywhere and awesome. It's very wide spread adoption is invaluable. I really don't want to see it replaced with zillions of different bespoke solutions.
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#65As someone who is comfortable with TOTP but hasn't tried FIDO-/Yubikey-style devices, I have a few questions: - Are drivers for this already installed as part of desktop Ubuntu 20.10/Windows 10? Any driver installation will absolutely make this a no-go for family members. - Is additional software required for anything non-techies might reasonably want to do with this device, including resetting it, adding an entry or…
Just wanted to add since I didn't see this covered in other comments yet -- TOTP and any sort of one time code authentication are just as phishable as passwords. Perhaps the biggest benefit for most people using U2F or FIDO2, is the large resistance to phishing. This is because of how the whole ecosystem has adopted FIDO2. When a FIDO2 key signs an assertion for a website, it includes the domain in the signature base…
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#66Also if someone hijacks your account using bruteforced recovery codes and/or email.
Also if the servers are compromised or account data leaked.
In short, it protects from some forms of phishing.
(I'm not trying to criticize FIDO2, just pointing out what to expect from it)
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#67Reminder: FIDO2 is mostly useless if your browser or your OS is compromised. Also if someone hijacks your account using bruteforced recovery codes and/or email. Also if the servers are compromised or account data leaked. In short, it protects from some forms of phishing. (I'm not trying to criticize FIDO2, just pointing out what to expect from it)
And hopefully recovery codes have maximum retry count?
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#68As someone who's not familiar with U2F or comparable standards I have a general question about the topic: When registering a key for multiple accounts (at the same site or at different sites) can website owners link those accounts by some common "key ID"? In the sense of: "Oh, this is Bob's key so this account must belong to Bob".
When you register your key on a service, the service sends an application identifier down. Your key then creates a fresh key pair and sends a handle (name for that keypair) and the public key back to the service. Later when you authenticate, the service sends down the handle and challenge. Your key uses the handle to find the right private key and sign the challenge, which is checked by the service using the public key to confirm that you do indeed possess the private key.
Since fresh keypairs (and handles) are generated each time you register a key, the service can't use the registration process to identify whether you're re-using a physical key (it should look no different from using a new physical key).
Alternatively, a service can check if your physical key contains other handles by initiating requests with them, but this will almost always be very obvious. E.g. If they suspect you are Bob, they could request a challenge with _Bob's_ handle.
But they can't just spray handles, since if they do this when you're not expecting to authenticate anything, it will be quite obvious: your key, and any intermediate applications like the browser or OS, will behave like they are authenticating. With a well implemented key, you will be safe as long as you don't touch the key on spurious authentication attempts. The service won't be able to tell whether the key doesn't have the handle (and is ignoring the challenge) or if the key does have it but you just didn't touch the key because you weren't expecting an authentication request.
This leaves the service with the final option of only doing the test while you're trying to log into what they suspect is an alternate account. That means they can only do one check and will have to be fairly certain about you being Bob lest you be tipped off. If they guess right, you won't be able to tell a difference but the service will know that you can authenticate with Bob's handle while trying to log in as Alice. If they guess wrong however, you might become suspicious since the authentication will fail and in a non-standard way (e.g. the key can indicate that it has received a foreign handle).
All this means is that, if the service is trying to tie identities to "serve ads", they won't have a feasible way to do this with U2F. But, if it's a threat actor with nation state level resources and lots of time then... well... nothing consumer level will really help you (though U2F still puts up a decent fight).
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#69As someone who's not familiar with U2F or comparable standards I have a general question about the topic: When registering a key for multiple accounts (at the same site or at different sites) can website owners link those accounts by some common "key ID"? In the sense of: "Oh, this is Bob's key so this account must belong to Bob".
No, they cannot. This is an explicit design goal of FIDO ( https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-security-requirements/fi... ). The actual public key used for logging in to a specific site is completely random. Optionally, the website can ask for "attestation", which is intended to prove that the public key is from a specific vendor/model. To make this also unlinkable, devices are supposed to share attestation keys in…
Re: FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust
#70Reminder: FIDO2 is mostly useless if your browser or your OS is compromised. Also if someone hijacks your account using bruteforced recovery codes and/or email. Also if the servers are compromised or account data leaked. In short, it protects from some forms of phishing. (I'm not trying to criticize FIDO2, just pointing out what to expect from it)
Otoh if your browser/os is not compromised, it's safer than authentication code and SMS OTP. And hopefully recovery codes have maximum retry count?
...but less safe than an external token if someone steals your laptop with the FIDO2 key in the USB port.
Yet, this are really very minor improvements to the (sorry) state of web and desktop security.