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Normal people will lose key material. Systems administrators sometimes lose key material! In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense

Normal people will lose key material. Systems administrators sometimes lose key material! In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense to revoke and reissue your credential if you lose it. If this is categorically posisble, then your identity is leased, not owned. Your SSH private key is not your identity, it's just some bytes. Your identity is determined by what public key is considered to be "you", i.e. what's in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Your infrastructure provider can usually change this, with or without your permission. Unless you own the land where the hard disk public key -> account mapping resides, your identity is leased.

drdaeman 11y ago
> Your SSH private key is not your identity Absolutely. It's my credential. In a perfect system, we decouple those from identities - but that's hard. If you have some ideas about this or know a system that handles this - please share a link. In a less than perfect system, we at least have to try to assure that credentials are self-sufficient and don't require a third party to just exist. That leaves us with either keypairs or pre-shared secrets (traditional passwords). Maybe something else but I don't know. > In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense to revoke and reissue your credential if you lose it Well, yes. However, there is just no advancement at the moment - proposed general approach is just not better or worse in this regard. It's the same as if you've lost your password and email in a most traditional identity system out there. If you lose all credentials - your identity's lost and you can only talk to each consumer individually and negotiate whenever a recovery's (to a new identity) possible. This doesn't change. However, in theory, you can set up a system in which your friends or someone you trust may help you to recover or revoke your key. I'm no crypto expert, but I heard we have fancy things like threshold signatures and secret sharing schemes (where k-out-of-n members quorum is necessary to recover a secret or generate a valid signature), so I believe there are some options for the future how we can improve things - in a ways more flexible and secure than things are now.
ploxiln 11y ago
Here's an idea: you can designate "emergency contacts", other keypairs that can be used to recover your identity, perhaps those of your family members. They could declare the intention to recover your credentials, and then you would have 2 weeks to publish a signal that you still possess your keypair, to block the recovery. You could also revoke their designation at that point, if they are abusing it. If two weeks pass without incident, then they can publish a new public key half which is considered yours, and presumably give the private half to you.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  This. And maybe even use Shamir's secret sharing (or a similar scheme) to split the backup/recovery key among the family members or trusted close friends - so a single person won't be able to compromise your security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

drdaeman 11y ago

> Your SSH private key is not your identity Absolutely. It's my credential. In a perfect system, we decouple those from identities - but that's hard. If you have some ideas about this or know a system that handles this - please share a link. In a less than perfect system, we at least have to try to assure that credentials are self-sufficient and don't require a third party to just exist. That leaves us with either keypairs or pre-shared secrets (traditional passwords). Maybe something else but I don't know. > In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense to revoke and reissue your credential if you lose it Well, yes. However, there is just no advancement at the moment - proposed general approach is just not better or worse in this regard. It's the same as if you've lost your password and email in a most traditional identity system out there. If you lose all credentials - your identity's lost and you can only talk to each consumer individually and negotiate whenever a recovery's (to a new identity) possible. This doesn't change. However, in theory, you can set up a system in which your friends or someone you trust may help you to recover or revoke your key. I'm no crypto expert, but I heard we have fancy things like threshold signatures and secret sharing schemes (where k-out-of-n members quorum is necessary to recover a secret or generate a valid signature), so I believe there are some options for the future how we can improve things - in a ways more flexible and secure than things are now.

ploxiln 11y ago

Here's an idea: you can designate "emergency contacts", other keypairs that can be used to recover your identity, perhaps those of your family members. They could declare the intention to recover your credentials, and then you would have 2 weeks to publish a signal that you still possess your keypair, to block the recovery. You could also revoke their designation at that point, if they are abusing it. If two weeks pass without incident, then they can publish a new public key half which is considered yours, and presumably give the private half to you.

drdaeman 11y ago
This. And maybe even use Shamir's secret sharing (or a similar scheme) to split the backup/recovery key among the family members or trusted close friends - so a single person won't be able to compromise your security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing