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FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

foks.pub

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Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#71

Post by richrichardsson »

xtajv wrote: post #67

Okay sorry nobody's said it yet. I'll say it. You cannot call it that. I will not be entering the workplace and suggesting that we use a product whose name is very easily mistaken for "the F word". It is an immediate non-starter. (I'm sure it's a great project, and you probably meant for people to pronounce the name as "folks" rather than... y'know, the other way. I'm telling you this in a spirit of kindness so your…

It's literally that word in Afrikaans!

edit: actually, I'm not sure if "fok" is used, but "fokken" is and it's fairly obvious what it means.

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#72

Post by disintegrator »

xtajv wrote: post #67

Okay sorry nobody's said it yet. I'll say it. You cannot call it that. I will not be entering the workplace and suggesting that we use a product whose name is very easily mistaken for "the F word". It is an immediate non-starter. (I'm sure it's a great project, and you probably meant for people to pronounce the name as "folks" rather than... y'know, the other way. I'm telling you this in a spirit of kindness so your…

Not a Firefox user I take it?

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#73

Post by [deleted] »

maxtaco wrote: post #2

Max here, author of FOKS. I find it interesting how much glue is required to perform basic cryptographic operations, even in 2025. Imagine a very simple idea like encrypting a secret with a YubiKey. If it's an important secret, that you really don't want to lose, then now you need a second YubiKey as a backup, in case the primary is lost or breaks. But now how do you encrypt and how do you rotate the primary out if n…

[deleted]

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#74

Post by raphinou »

maxtaco wrote: post #65
raphinou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! We're at a very early stage of the implementation and develop in rust. We aim to provide multi-sig capabilities, as defined in a JSON file where the public keys of the signers can be found. If a signer looses a key, we want this 'signers' file to be updatable with the new key. We decided that signers can be humans of processes, so the keys are not an identity of a person, which might be an important deta…

An attack that might be of concern with this configuration is the server suppressing updates to this JSON file, or showing different versions of the JSON file to different clients. What you're describing is pretty close to what FOKS is getting at with signature chains and Merkle Trees, but maybe it's overkill for this particular application. I wonder if the policy you describe could be implemented as world-visible te…

Although I didn't consider this attack possibility (thanks for raising it!), I think we are reasonably immune to it or able to detect it with the way we manipulate and store the JSON (though completely avoiding it seems not attainable, at one point the client has to trust the response it gets from a server, am I right? Otherwise I'm very interested in pointers to learn more!)

World visible teams and users might be a way to define our multi-sigs members. But we would still need a JSON file for others characteristics of the multi-sig. I'll keep an eye on foks as if it becomes a good fit, it might let us concentrate on our service and not on key management intricacies. My email is on my HN profile, in case you want to notify me of advancement fitting our use case.

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#75

Post by password4321 »

xtajv wrote: post #67

Okay sorry nobody's said it yet. I'll say it. You cannot call it that. I will not be entering the workplace and suggesting that we use a product whose name is very easily mistaken for "the F word". It is an immediate non-starter. (I'm sure it's a great project, and you probably meant for people to pronounce the name as "folks" rather than... y'know, the other way. I'm telling you this in a spirit of kindness so your…

Zero FOKS given

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#76

Post by dpifke »

maxtaco wrote: post #2

Max here, author of FOKS. I find it interesting how much glue is required to perform basic cryptographic operations, even in 2025. Imagine a very simple idea like encrypting a secret with a YubiKey. If it's an important secret, that you really don't want to lose, then now you need a second YubiKey as a backup, in case the primary is lost or breaks. But now how do you encrypt and how do you rotate the primary out if n…

For all of GnuPG's faults, the usage you've described is exactly why I still use it. I have my master PGP key copied to several offline Yubikeys (one of which is stored offsite), and two day-to-day Yubikeys (one of which is always with me on my physical keychain) containing my current signing and encryption subkeys. The signing subkey is also used for SSH authentication. The second slot on the day-to-day Yubikeys is used for WebAuthn/Passkeys. The master key is brought out of storage only if I need to rotate or revoke a day-to-day subkey, or attest someone else's key for web-of-trust purposes.

I sign all of my Git commits, as well as Debian packages. I occasionally sign and encrypt email. My most important encryption use case is file backups, which are encrypted to my public key and copied offsite.

I'm excited about FOKS if it can serve as a modern alternative to the above, with fewer footguns that GnuPG.

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#78

Post by karambanoonoo »

aspenmayer wrote: post #51
hofrogs wrote: post #12

[flagged]

I think this complaint is likely against HN guidelines against these kinds of complaints about the site layout or how the page is designed. Will be flagging this complaint every time in the future because I consider it against guidelines. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without consideration, per Hitchens’s Razor. I don’t think research exists about a relation between AI generated images…

[flagged]

Re: FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

#80

Post by vkaku »

maxtaco wrote: post #2

Max here, author of FOKS. I find it interesting how much glue is required to perform basic cryptographic operations, even in 2025. Imagine a very simple idea like encrypting a secret with a YubiKey. If it's an important secret, that you really don't want to lose, then now you need a second YubiKey as a backup, in case the primary is lost or breaks. But now how do you encrypt and how do you rotate the primary out if n…

Good to know someone's thinking of decentralizing the whole thing :) Always been wondering where to lay these keys out, if people want to start recovering their data / keys. Something like this + IPFS would be radical, and allow folks to encrypt and circulate easily. Thank you for building this. So ... I wonder how you got here after building Keybase, what's the motivation this time, how do you envision this gets hosted?

P.S. I built this for Group Encryption a few years ago, to help circulate key hives offline https://github.com/guilt/groupenc

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