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Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

blog.lizdenys.com

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Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#91

Post by maxtaco »

tveita wrote: post #77
maxtaco wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a thought experiment to encourage people to think about the issue at hand and not dismiss it with a knee-jerk. Your concern is now key stretching and password selection.

Well, no, my concern is still to tell people to stay away from Keybase.io, or if they have to use it, to not upload their private key even though it seems to encourage you to, or if they have to upload their key, to use a really strong password and not use the key for anything else. In that order. I think that asking people for their private key is a bad thing that bad sites do. A password derived key isn't random, a…

Many Random Oracle crypto proofs assume a value is random and then substitute in something that's not quite so good, so I think it's a valid thought experiment. And some passwords do have 256 bits of randomness (i.e., ~15 random words from the dictionary). I think we disagree on what margin of password security we feel comfortable with.

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#92

Post by voltagex_ »

rakoo wrote: post #70
jnbiche wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out OneName? It runs on the Namecoin blockchain, so it's quite decentralized. I've not actually tried it yet, but it looks pretty damn cool. https://onename.io/

Then again, why not use namecoin ? They (we ?) have a spec with what format your records should look like: https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Identity Basically, there's a whole id/ namespace where you register your personal information, and there's a d/ namespace where you register domain names (akin to DNS). Onename is the same except they use i/ (they haven't even tried to discuss it and basically did it a…

>You have asked Firefox to connect securely to wiki.namecoin.info, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#93

Post by SomeoneWeird »

phelmig wrote: post #84
dfox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keybase seems to want identity proofs to be independently verifiable, which would not work with challenge/response mechanism.

Yeah, I know this is somehow the point. On the other hand it (maybe?) would be more useful if they would just verify that certain online-personas (e.g. github, pgp, blog) are the same person, which you could do. I want to know that liz, is the liz that blogs and liz who forks on github, not necessary her facebook/linkedin/real name.

This is exactly what Keybase does.

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#94

Post by tveita »

maxtaco wrote: post #91
tveita wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, my concern is still to tell people to stay away from Keybase.io, or if they have to use it, to not upload their private key even though it seems to encourage you to, or if they have to upload their key, to use a really strong password and not use the key for anything else. In that order. I think that asking people for their private key is a bad thing that bad sites do. A password derived key isn't random, a…

Many Random Oracle crypto proofs assume a value is random and then substitute in something that's not quite so good, so I think it's a valid thought experiment. And some passwords do have 256 bits of randomness (i.e., ~15 random words from the dictionary). I think we disagree on what margin of password security we feel comfortable with.

Right, in random oracle proofs you assume that values are random, and then you replace them with something that no one can distinguish from random.

Then you consider it broken when someone finds a distinguisher requiring three exabytes of output, because any distinguishable non-randomness breaks the proof.

It's trivial to make a distinguisher for user passwords. Just guess "password".

There's an inherent difference between random keys and chosen passwords. Random keys, used correctly, are secure. Passwords just give you a chance to provide your own security, and most people fail to do so. No one are picking 15 random words from a dictionary to make their passwords.

Passwords are one of the weakest links in IT security, on par with the people, and I don't think making them more of a single point of failure is the way to better security. That's what widespread 2-factor authentication was getting us away from.

Have you tried cracking uploaded keys to check the strength of the passwords?

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#95

Post by awalton »

kylec wrote: post #23

I like the idea of Keybase.io, but I would prefer to use it in a way in which I don't have to trust them at all. As it stands, you need to install their command-line tool and have it directly manage your GPG keychain. For that, I'd prefer to have a platform-neutral tool that's been independently audited and managed by my OS's package manager rather than their keybase-installer tool which seems to want to update very…

> platform-neutral tool that's been independently audited and managed by my OS's package manager

Your OS's package manager is simply wrapping up whoever else's software in a nice pretty bow and releasing it. The only veracity it has is that the person who put the bow on it signed it. It's highly unlikely they did any kind of "independent auditing" or managing beyond writing some script to build the software.

Or worse: if Debian is an example, they'll say "I don't understand this code, therefore it's not useful", comment it out, and ship horribly broken software to you.

At the end of the day, you have to trust someone. Whether you trust keybase.io or not is entirely up to you - liz setup an incredibly tedious blog post to basically say just this.

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#96

Post by SideshowBobb »

rakoo wrote: post #70
jnbiche wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out OneName? It runs on the Namecoin blockchain, so it's quite decentralized. I've not actually tried it yet, but it looks pretty damn cool. https://onename.io/

Then again, why not use namecoin ? They (we ?) have a spec with what format your records should look like: https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Identity Basically, there's a whole id/ namespace where you register your personal information, and there's a d/ namespace where you register domain names (akin to DNS). Onename is the same except they use i/ (they haven't even tried to discuss it and basically did it a…

Doesn't putting the namecoin blockchain on a remote server and then using the traditional DNS system to interact with the remote Namecoin DNS system completely defeat the purpose of Namecoin DNS?

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#97

Post by kstrauser »

malgorithms wrote: post #56
kylec wrote: post #23

I like the idea of Keybase.io, but I would prefer to use it in a way in which I don't have to trust them at all. As it stands, you need to install their command-line tool and have it directly manage your GPG keychain. For that, I'd prefer to have a platform-neutral tool that's been independently audited and managed by my OS's package manager rather than their keybase-installer tool which seems to want to update very…

While we like being #1 on Hacker News, bad (good?!) timing is what earned us this spot. It will be the case very soon that you can push your key to Keybase and prove all your identities, without ever installing the client the OP dislikes. Technically, you can already, we just need to put together very explicit instructions and documentation that's different for each kind of proof. By ugly necessity, what it takes to…

So, am I (as #3000-something in the beta queue when I signed up for it) any nearer to having an account I can start testing? :-)

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#98

Post by voltagex_ »

tlrobinson wrote: post #64
davmre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that Keybase is compromised. It starts serving a password-prompt page that looks identical to the previous, but now sends your decrypted key straight to the malicious attacker. Storing your private key on Keybase allows Keybase to become a single point of failure, which pretty much defeats the whole point of distributed social verification in the first place.

As an aside, the web is an extremely convenient application distribution platform, it seems like a shame we can't securely use it for anything remotely sensitive. Is there a middle ground somewhere? e.x. signed bundles of HTML/CSS/JS?

If you ever run into a VBScript on an old section of microsoft.com, it's likely to be signed. I think I've seen a Sharepoint Javascript file with a signature block on the end but I wonder if MS had more plans for this.

Re: Refusing to verify myself: I am liz on Keybase.io

#99

Post by larrysalibra »

jnbiche wrote: post #43
epaulson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like the idea of Keybase.io, though I wish it was based on something a little more decentralized. The unfortunately-named WebFist looks cool: http://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-w...

Have you checked out OneName? It runs on the Namecoin blockchain, so it's quite decentralized. I've not actually tried it yet, but it looks pretty damn cool. https://onename.io/

And unlike keybase's "it's complicated so it must be good" proofs, onename's proofs are easy -> add a pointer from your onename namespace to your social media property and a pointer back to onename to prove you own it. No need to generate signatures that break when anything changes.

https://onename.io/larry https://keybase.io/larry

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