18 ms·

Yubico and Microsoft Introduce Passwordless Login

280 points by guitarbill 8y ago

grondilu 8y ago
Can someone remind me why we don't use public key cryptography for authentication on websites?
- zrail 8y ago
  The browser UI is terrible and there's been very little incentive to improve it. The largest user of client-side crypto that I'm aware of is the US DoD with the Common Access Card program, and they just train people on how to use the crappy UI.
  - u801e 8y ago
    > The browser UI is terrible and there's been very little incentive to improve it. It seems like a chicken and egg problem. There's very little incentive to improve it because practically no one uses it. And no one uses it because it's a bad user experience. But I would prefer it over using a Yubikey because, IMO, the private key should be associated with a machine, rather than a person. That is, if one of my devices is stolen or compromised, I can use another one of my devices to revoke the stolen/compromised device's access.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  Key management.
- mtgx 8y ago
  That's exactly what this is. From the post: > FIDO2 is built on the same security and privacy features of FIDO U2F: strong public key cryptography, no drivers or client software and one key for unlimited account access with no shared secrets. They should've kept all the Microsoft stuff out of the post, other than just mentioning that they've been working on the spec together. The Azure stuff seems to have confused everyone about how this actually works. There are also other app-based ways to login to websites with public key crypto, such as https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm, or https://www.civic.com/ https://www.civic.com/. But of course they are less secure than the hardware/Yubikey version, for the same reason Yubikey U2F tokens are more secure than Google Authenticator for 2FA (well, unless companies act stupid and enable "SMS backup" alongside Yubikey support, in which case it's even less secure than Google Auth-only as an option).
- swebs 8y ago
  It looks like there's a W3C draft "in the works" but I'm concerned since almost half the editors work for the two companies trying to pass this proprietary Azure/AD vendor lock-in nonsense. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR-webauthn-20180320 https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR-webauthn-20180320
  - ilikepi 8y ago
    You may be comforted by the fact that the top three people on the Github contributor graph[1] are not from those two companies. I've skimmed some of the published meeting minutes[2], and JCJ (Mozilla) and JeffH (Paypal) seem to be highly involved. [1]: https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/graphs/contributors https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/graphs/contributors [2]: https://www.w3.org/blog/webauthn/2018/01/11/meeting-minutes-2018/ https://www.w3.org/blog/webauthn/2018/01/11/meeting-minutes-... EDIT: add forgotten link
  - colemickens 8y ago
    What is "this proprietary Azure/AD vendor lock-in" that you refer to? How is Azure AD more proprietary than AWS SSO, etc?
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Because you'd need a cross-platform, cross-machine, cross-device key management infrastructure and browser support that simply doesn't exist. Even if you contrast it against something like e.g. LastPass or Keepass, you're still missing a ton of infrastructure.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Beyond what the other comments mention... there's also the fact that most home users only use a single browser, and user account for everyone in the family.
djrogers 8y ago
More specifically, they're introducing passwordless login with FIDO2, as Windows had had passwordless logins with certs and CAC cards for ages.
pg_bot 8y ago
Glad to see greater adoption of Yubikeys, however there is still a long way to go. Speaking from experience writing a u2f_auth client library, browser support is still nascent and hacky. Edge, safari, and AWS would need to adopt it before I would truly consider it mainstream. If anyone is considering adopting Yubikeys in their organization using a language that is not supported by one of their client libraries my email is in my profile and I would glad to help out to the best of my ability.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
So my biggest question here is: Is this Azure only? Each announcement about it seems to indicate that I might not be able to use this key with my local account PC. Specifically, I have one use case computer where I have no screen, and getting through Windows login without it can be troublesome. I'd love to use this key to unlock it instead, but it's an offline machine. I had this plan with Yubikey for Windows Hello, which has been out a while, and I bought a Yubikey, and discovered it could only unlock my Windows machine if it was locked (not logged out), which defeated the purpose entirely.
- fl0wenol 8y ago
  Unfortunately it only works with Azure (at the minimum AD federation with Azure if you have some on-prem)
  - youdontknowtho 8y ago
    You can use other identity providers for Azure AD. Shibboleth is supported, F5 and Ping are certified, there are others. If you use a different LDAP system than AD you can also sync your identities to Azure AD. OpenLDAP or one of the commercial vendors. It might be a little more elbow grease, but it works.
tahw 8y ago
Ad companies that specialize in re-targeting are going to have an absolute blast with this!
- Xylakant 8y ago
  How? Login is not automatic, you need to tap the key. So unless you tap the key each time you view an ad, the ad company gets nothing.
BartBoch 8y ago
Two things - is there really need for them to be this large? They also look vulnerable? Maybe its just the look, but the blue one looks like it won't survive proper stress test... And second thing - is exposing connector safe against mechanical damage? Will it withstand constantly being scratched by keys?
- pg_bot 8y ago
  There is the "nano" version available which is a lot smaller than the one advertised. The ones that I own have held up just fine for the past year on my keychain. https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4-nano https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4-n...
  - BartBoch 8y ago
    This size is much better, but I assume it lacks the "touch" protection against remote attacks, like the other ones? I still wonder about the exposed connector - what its durability. After all, I would like for such a tool to serve me for years fault-free.
    - lovelettr 8y ago
      I personally have the nano version. > but I assume it lacks the "touch" protection against remote attacks It has the touch protection. There is a small strip of metal that protrudes beyond the USB port that you touch. > what its durability I've used it daily for about a year. Granted this is not "years" but so far it still feels very solid.
      - BartBoch 8y ago
        Sounds good then. I am ready to test one of them. Thanks!
    - GordonS 8y ago
      Forgive my ignorance, but could you explain what "touch" protection is please?
vzaliva 8y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but passwordless login is a single-factor authentication and less secure than MFA. Depending on whenever hardware key is more or less secure than the password, the mass adoption of this could make things LESS secure.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  I would expect things to be more secure in many cases. People are pretty good at keeping physical items somewhat safe and notice when they’re gone. Yubikeys cannot easily be cloned. The password cannot be attacked remotely. 2FA is certainly safer, though.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    Passwords are utterly broken. All the entropy of memorizable passwords among humans have probably been extracted by this point. All they give you is a false sense of security. The password portion of 2FA is mostly theater, conditioned on the notion that passwords are broken. Hardware keys is the way of the future.
    - d4l3k 8y ago
      Except that passwords at least protect you if your hardware key is stolen. Using just a hardware key seems similarly risky to just using a password.
      - pishpash 8y ago
        What you need is a mechanism to detect loss of contact with the human and revoke. One way is to require several hardware tokens to combine their entropy to authenticate. Again, don't make a password be a part of this, use another token.
      - e1ven 8y ago
        Exactly - It's similar reason to the crypto keys use passphrases.
      - 8y ago
Tomte 8y ago
Okay, so I have two Yubico U2F keys and two other U2F keys so far. I don't think I'll buy a fifth and sixth anytime soon. But hopefully U2F will actually work in non-Chrome browsers in the near future.
- Spone 8y ago
  It already works in Firefox (behind a flag), but sadly some websites explicitly target Chrome...
  - Tomte 8y ago
    Exactly. In practice it doesn't work. I have a few web sites where I'm using U2F, none of those works with Firefox.
  - guitarbill 8y ago
    FF traditionally required a plugin, I think native support is recent?
    - mcbain 8y ago
      It was added in Firefox 57. Works fine for me.
- bostik 8y ago
  > But hopefully U2F will actually work in non-Chrome browsers in the near future. I would guess you're referring to being able to log in to gmail (or anything in G Suite) with U2F from Firefox. U2F is already available in the most recent version. See "security.webauth.*" keys in about:config. It just won't work with Google, at least not yet. Google's implementation predates webauth by a pretty fair margin, and from what I have learned, is different in small but important ways from the standard. So we have a situation that drips irony: we have a U2F standard, usable via a standard authentication mechanism - and incompatible with the very web property that drove the concerted push for the technology's adoption.
  - 8y ago
pishpash 8y ago
Good. After all the roundabout bullshit of "factors" ("2FA") and password managers, people have finally come to their senses that physical tokens are a very natural evolution of analog keys and the only real security, and should have been used from the get-go.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Keys are not the only real security... real security includes something you are, something you have, and something you know. Having something like this combined with the something you know (passphrase) would be real closer security. Now anyone with your token can access everything that key gets access to, without you needing to be there, or sharing a passphrase. That's less secure imho.
  - xur17 8y ago
    A lot of these devices allow you to configure a pin code that is required to unlock the device before use, which effectively provides a second factor. Also, stealing a fido device requires physical theft and can't be duplicated, so the owner would likely know if it was stolen.
  - emlun 8y ago
    As xur17 points out, these devices support an on-device PIN like smart cards. The protocol also has support for future devices with biometric authentication, which could give you all three factors in one device.
fabian2k 8y ago
What I'd find interesting is using U2F (or FIDO2, which seems to be an evolution of this) as a second factor for SSH logins. But that doesn't seem possible without changes to SSH itself. And I hope that this might trigger more widespread support for U2F and similar mechanisms in browsers and websites.
- floatboth 8y ago
  No need to touch SSH itself, PAM is a thing (unless you're on OpenBSD). Here's an example of pam-u2f with OpenSSH: https://aprilmacdonald.com/two-factor-ssh-authentication-with-u2f-hardware-security-key/ https://aprilmacdonald.com/two-factor-ssh-authentication-wit... I actually use a Yubikey for SSH in a different way: with gpg-agent. E.g. https://blog.habets.se/2013/02/GPG-and-SSH-with-Yubikey-NEO.html https://blog.habets.se/2013/02/GPG-and-SSH-with-Yubikey-NEO....
  - jlgaddis 8y ago
    > PAM is a thing (unless you're on OpenBSD) And if you are on OpenBSD, there's login_yubikey [0] (although it uses OTP instead of U2F). [0]: https://man.openbsd.org/login_yubikey.8 https://man.openbsd.org/login_yubikey.8
belst 8y ago
So this needs a new yubikey? I can have passwordless login on linux right now with my old yubikey.
- emlun 8y ago
  Depends on what features you want. The old U2F YubiKeys are compatible as 2nd factor keys, but they don't support the passwordless (PIN) or username-less (user ID stored on device) use cases.
BoppreH 8y ago
Did they improve the stories for recovery ("I lost my device") and revocation ("my device has been stolen")? As far as I knew you had to buy 2 devices to have a chance of recovery, and Fido 1 explicitly said "revocation is something that needs to be resolved by each website that authenticates users", which is just asking for trouble. I would love to have a hardware (or even phone-based) alternative to passwords, with no third-party and better privacy, but I feel like this solution only handles the happy path. For an example of a happy-path-only system that makes me nervous, look at Google Authenticator. Recovery is made with backup codes, but they are also "resolved by each website" (https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/167563/where-to-find-google-authenticator-backup-codes https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/167563/where-to...), which often means no support at all. Not to mention having to create a new backup after creating a new account. I still use Google Authenticator myself, but I dread the day I lose my phone. If the protocol doesn't handle recovery/authentication, the fallback is a trusted third party (e.g. email) or legal identity (e.g. scanned passport). Aside from being a huge hassle and creating a weak point, it weakens the user's privacy.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  Neither of those problems (lost key, compromised key) are anything new. Why wouldn't sites just handle them the same way they currently handle revoking/resetting passwords?
  - BoppreH 8y ago
    Because the current way sucks. 99% of the websites (I have accounts on) rely on my email for recovery and revocation. But my inbox is not an impenetrable fortress, it's a communication channel; every device I own has access to it, and could be used as a backdoor to my entire digital life. Then there's the risk of the third-party (Google banning me, being hacked, subpoena'd, etc), the privacy factor (see the Ashley Madison leaks), the often custom code implemented by each website...
    - noja 8y ago
      > every device I own is has access to it and this sucks. Why can't I use my google account with my tablet without it automatically getting access to gmail sync?
floatboth 8y ago
Can someone explain why CTAP was created? What exactly was wrong / not enough about the original U2F protocol?
- Boulth 8y ago
  I wonder the same. I see the differences in protocols here and there but no fundamental things changed.
- emlun 8y ago
  Some differences: - CTAP2 supports "user verification", such as PIN or biometric authentication locally on the hardware key. This enables using the key as both 1st and 2nd factor without need for a server-side password. - CTAP2 supports storing the private key along with some metadata on the device, whereas U2F instead encrypts the private key and stores the ciphertext on the server. While the encryption approach allows for simpler hardware and an unlimited number of registrations, the local storage approach allows login without even having to type (or even have) a username. CTAP2 supports both. - CTAP2 has an extensions framework in which an authentication vendor and server can cooperate to implement custom features without the browser having to understand them. - CTAP2 - or at least the companion web API, Web Authentication - is compatible with more existing TPMs and such hardware. For example, it's theoretically possible that some Android phones could receive software upgrades that turn their fingerprint sensors into WebAuthn authenticators.
dogma1138 8y ago
Would be interesting if this would become popular one downside I see to this is that if law enforcement get their hands on your token they can unlock the device. Also as the token can be regarded as a key rather than a password a court would be able to legally compel you to surrender it without invoking much debate regarding laws against self incrimination (e.g. the fifth).
- krupan 8y ago
  Can't law enforcement now just ask Google or Facebook or whoever for the information they need without needing your password (or future token)?
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It's not that simple, firstly some Google and Facebook services are E2E encrypted which means that they cannot comply. This also goes well beyond just Facebook and Google and if you use it to lock a physical device like a phone or a laptop that isn't something Google or Facebook would be able to help law enforcement with. Also while I don't want to make a statement or start a debate on the level of compliance and attitude that Google and the rest have towards search warrants (because it's not relevant and I don't have sufficient knowledge to actually form an informed opinion on the matter). Google and Facebook's legal departments have more funding than most state attorneys yet alone local DA's if they want to fight on your behalf (or on the behalf of their business model) in court they would be able to do so much more effectively than you ever could. Google and Facebook also require a full and lengthy process with FIDO tokens they can do it on the spot, heck they are legally able to do so if you either agree to a search or law enforcement has an alternative sufficient basis to invoke a lawful warrantless search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrantless_searches_in_the_United_States#Exceptions_to_the_search_warrant_requirement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrantless_searches_in_the_Un... TLDR; Officer: May I search your vehicle You: Yes At that point they are legally are allowed to take the FIDO token from your keychain and unlock your laptop.
nikolay 8y ago
No USB-C version and no way to upgrade my other 4+ YubiKeys I've got for more than $50 each! I think YubiKey has been abusing its monopoly recently! They've been working on this for quite some time and clearly new they're not going to make their old premium keys support it so that people can waste time and money to upgrade! Is there an alternative more conscious company - I'd pay even $200 for the piece of mind that I won't have to change this key 1-2 times per year! P.S. Obviously, no. Neither Nitrokey [0] supports it, nor it's a sturdy one! [0]: https://www.nitrokey.com/ https://www.nitrokey.com/
- mynameisvlad 8y ago
  I will point out, NitroKey also doesn't have a USB-C version.
  - nikolay 8y ago
    True, nobody seems to offer USB-C. Also, I have to point out that YubiKey 4C [0] is not sturdy either unlike the rest - it disintegrated on my keychain in less than two months without any abuse. [0]: https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c
- pfg 8y ago
  YubiKeys are non-upgradable by design. This is occasionally annoying when new standards come out and you need to go buy new keys (which is not something that's gonna happen a lot), but it significantly reduces the attack surface of these devices. They've been pretty good about giving out free replacement keys whenever major flaws have been found, and webauthn is pretty good about remaining backwards-compatible with U2F keys, so I don't think it's something they handled particularly badly.
  - nikolay 8y ago
    I get that, but my point was that they just released expensive new products knowing they'd be obsolete in just a couple of months and people will have to throw old ones in the garbage and buy new even more expensive ones. I do not doubt that a product with an immutable core and mutable interfaces is both possible and even more secure as when flaws are discovered (like last year), some may decide not to replace them - even with free replacement. I spent over $100 just last year, and I think this is a bit too much. I give my old keys to my kids, but, still, I'd appreciate some form of subscription service, which both reduces my recurring cost and possibly improves Yubico's bottom line, too, primarily by building loyalty instead of pissing customers off.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
My problem is that Microsoft doesn't allow swapping in and out of authentication plugins like PAM. I work primarily in a Windows shop, and I got the other co-workers in Linux because PAM supports seamless multi-factor auth. I would have went Windows, but its too obfuscated or hard to do that. LinOTP works very well. And LinOTP works with a wide variety of tokens. Don't be locked to a single vendor.
- ShroudedNight 8y ago
  > Microsoft doesn't allow swapping in and out of authentication plugins like PAM. FWIW, that's not strictly true. See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt158211(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt1... I don't have enough experience to comment one way or the other about its difficulty.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Well, this certainly surprises me. I know last I looked, there was some discussion about MFA and requiring Azure. In the environment I work in, I'm not able to use services outside a very limited list, or I have to roll my own using established technologies (FedRAMP). So Azure is right out. So was using Amazon Directory Services. I know my colleagues are much more familiar with Windows, whereas I.. (look at username, relevant!). My solution, after assessing that Windows couldn't do 2 (or 3) factor, and it was stuck at login/password and some firewall blocking IP's, I knew what I had to do. And that meant Linux for the bastions, and LinOTP and appropriate config options to make it work. I was kind, and didn't inflict a AAA stack of "kerb, ldap, radius, and shib" on the Windows admins :) Well, that and I didn't want to be the sole maintainer of that system.
    - ShroudedNight 8y ago
      To be fair, the only reason I knew of this at all is because of a brief patronage of a library in Belgium during a trip I took in the summer of '99. The computer systems of said library used a bizarre system of time-limited authentication tokens stored on floppy disks that were used during the Windows log-on process. I was curious how it might have worked.
krupan 8y ago
The conversation here is blowing my mind. People are actually worried that their yubikey might get lost or stolen when likely most of your passwords are already all over the internet. I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password. Twitter! Not Joe's Auto-Body who's website is being run by a high-schooler, but one of the pioneers of internet companies. They messed up. Your password is not safer "in your head" than a private key because it is not only in your head (who keeps all passwords in their head anymore anyway?) Private keys are way, way more secure than passwords for that reason alone. You don't have to give anything secret to a third party. If that's the one problem this solves and revocation and recovery and 2-factor are all still as difficult and broken as they are now with passwords that's still a huge win. EDIT: more thoughts. I also really hope that hardware tokens like a yubikey are not required for every site or app. I'd like to be able to keep private keys on my phone or laptop for some things (how many of us keep our ssh keys exclusively on hardware tokens?).
- georgyo 8y ago
  Still reading the comments, but is anyone actually saying passwords are more secure in general? I think most people are saying that they get locked out of their account if they lose the token. How do you validate your account is your account if the only secret you have is lost? If you 100% require a hardware token, you need at least two and/or a method to auth that is not a hardware token so you can recover in a mode where you lost one. But on the security note. There are several types of security. Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet. Without any malware, I could pickup my friends keys and log into their account on my computer in seconds and without their knowledge. This is harder to do with a password. At the same time a password is much easier for someone who doesn't even know who I am to attack. It's why 2FA is so necessary, it helps defend against both methods of attack.
  - krupan 8y ago
    "Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet." Are the people around you not on the internet? They are just a subset of that larger group, aren't they? Sorry if I'm not understanding your point there. And like I said in my edit, I really hope that Yubikey is not the one and only one way to store private keys. I personally would be perfectly happy, for most websites and apps, to manage keys just like I do for ssh. On my hard drive, backed up to another hard drive or two of mine, protected by a passphrase. I imagine most people would be pretty comfortable letting a service like lastpass manage most of their private keys for them, with multiple copies synced between devices and encrypted with a strong passphrase.
emlun 8y ago
I'd like to try to answer some common questions I see here: - Q: Doesn't passwordless mean single factor? Isn't that insecure? A: It could mean single- or two-factor. FIDO2 and the new YubiKeys support an on-device PIN that isn't shared with the server, like conventional smart cards. This allows the key to act as both "something you have" (the key itself) and "something you know" (the PIN for the key). The PIN is optional, though, so both the single factor and two factor use cases are possible. - Q: Is this Azure/Windows/AD only? A: This post highlights the partnership with Microsoft and the integration with their products, but FIDO2 is not Microsoft-only (and Yubico will not be the only key vendor). CTAP2, once finished, will be published as an open standard like U2F, and the accompanying Web Authentication API [1] (WIP) is an OS-agnostic W3C standard enabling the same features in browsers. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/ - Q: Will I need a new YubiKey? A: For passwordless (PIN) login, yes. However, existing YubiKeys with U2F support will be usable as a 2nd factor in Web Authentication, and sites that currently use U2F can upgrade to using the Web Authentication API without needing their users to re-enroll their keys. Full disclosure: I'm a Yubico engineer and one of the editors of the Web Authentication spec.
- ahelwer 8y ago
  What's the deal with lost yubikey user workflow? Rely on individual websites to give you a one-time recovery passcode that you then have to input into every website? I can't believe I'm taking UX cues from cryptocurrencies, but what about providing the user with a seed for the yubikey private key they can back-up offline then reinstall in a new yubikey? P.S. just ordered a yubikey security key, excited to add this additional layer to my own personal byzantine security labyrinth. Or maybe simplify it, who knows!
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Recovery codes or 2 Yubikeys.
  - krrrh 8y ago
    You can use Trezor or Ledger hardware wallets for U2F with recoverable seed words. Even if you go with a Yubikey, which has a better form factor, one of these is a pretty good backup device since they can be further backed up to paper.
lisper 8y ago
Here is a completely standalone (no server required) and self-contained (no dependencies) FIDO U2F test: https://github.com/rongarret/u2f-test https://github.com/rongarret/u2f-test
jimmcslim 8y ago
Anyone think that Apple is likely to add support for FIDO anytime soon?
zmarker 8y ago
This looks like another avenue for enhanced tracking of unique users. Don't give up your multiple passwords.
LammyL 8y ago
I wonder if we’ll get to the point of having two-factor passwordless authentication. Like you need two of the following methods to access a website (u2f/fido2, TOTP, SMS, Recovery codes, tls client certificate, etc.) and forego passwords altogether.
joering2 8y ago
Why can't I secure login with a fingerprint? Microsoft could have team up with Logitech like Sony with Erricson, and come up with a standard and put (mildly cheap) finger print reader on each sold keyboard and popularize open source standard for software implementation.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Your fingerprint is not a key, it's an identity. So your design tells every place you sign in this way "I'm joering2". And if course if any of them want to log in somewhere else, they now know to say the same thing, "I'm joering2". I guess this is slightly easier than typing your email address? But it's not a security feature. The FIDO/U2F design is a cryptographic key enshrined as a physical key, so rather than "I'm joering2" it says: "I can prove I'm this particular key talking to your site again using mathematics". Which key? No way to know, but it's the same one as before. Google can't use the credentials it presents to them to get into Facebook and vice versa, the proof from yesterday is worthless today and so on.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    > Your fingerprint is not a key, it's an identity. Also, you can't revoke fingerprints when they're compromised more than 10 times (20 if you're willing to use your toes too).
  - emlun 8y ago
    This. Though I'd like to add that FIDO2 does support fingerprints and other biometrics as an additional authentication factor - it all goes under the same abstract "user verification" umbrella as PIN does. The important distinction is that the PIN or fingerprint is never shared with the server - it's only used to unlock the private key - so it's much more difficult to steal.
aepiepaey 8y ago
It's too bad sshd never got support for U2F. Seems like the discussions just petered out. Maybe the introduction of FIDO2 will spark some interest in that again? https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319 https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319 Yes, sure, you could use pam-u2f, but that will never be as seamless as having it supported upstream in ssh. Or you could use the OTP mode instead, but that has other disadvantages (you have to depend on yubico's servers or run your own KSM+validation servers).
deleted 8y ago
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blablabla123 8y ago
I wonder if these Hardware key really make things better for the end-user. When using it even for login, people connect it to their laptops - that's what most people work with after all - and they must make sure they don't forget it there. As well they need to worry nobody steals it, whether it's on your laptop or you become a theft victim on the street. In the latter case the thieves might know what a Yubikey is and ask you for the pin. Not sure what problem this solves. But I have the impression we're converting a virtual problem into a physical problem. To be honest I prefer to save keys on laptop drives, that's more difficult to steal, especially when using an encrypted disk.
Install_Gentoo 8y ago
Why is this a "new" thing? I have my sisters laptop to do that with linux mint. ???
IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
why isn't a phone with a secure enclave (or similar) the focus, instead of something that doesn't work on mobile?

280 points by guitarbill 8y ago

grondilu 8y ago

Can someone remind me why we don't use public key cryptography for authentication on websites?

zrail 8y ago
The browser UI is terrible and there's been very little incentive to improve it. The largest user of client-side crypto that I'm aware of is the US DoD with the Common Access Card program, and they just train people on how to use the crappy UI.
- u801e 8y ago
  > The browser UI is terrible and there's been very little incentive to improve it. It seems like a chicken and egg problem. There's very little incentive to improve it because practically no one uses it. And no one uses it because it's a bad user experience. But I would prefer it over using a Yubikey because, IMO, the private key should be associated with a machine, rather than a person. That is, if one of my devices is stolen or compromised, I can use another one of my devices to revoke the stolen/compromised device's access.
prostoalex 8y ago
Key management.
mtgx 8y ago
That's exactly what this is. From the post: > FIDO2 is built on the same security and privacy features of FIDO U2F: strong public key cryptography, no drivers or client software and one key for unlimited account access with no shared secrets. They should've kept all the Microsoft stuff out of the post, other than just mentioning that they've been working on the spec together. The Azure stuff seems to have confused everyone about how this actually works. There are also other app-based ways to login to websites with public key crypto, such as https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm, or https://www.civic.com/ https://www.civic.com/. But of course they are less secure than the hardware/Yubikey version, for the same reason Yubikey U2F tokens are more secure than Google Authenticator for 2FA (well, unless companies act stupid and enable "SMS backup" alongside Yubikey support, in which case it's even less secure than Google Auth-only as an option).
swebs 8y ago
It looks like there's a W3C draft "in the works" but I'm concerned since almost half the editors work for the two companies trying to pass this proprietary Azure/AD vendor lock-in nonsense. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR-webauthn-20180320 https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR-webauthn-20180320
- ilikepi 8y ago
  You may be comforted by the fact that the top three people on the Github contributor graph[1] are not from those two companies. I've skimmed some of the published meeting minutes[2], and JCJ (Mozilla) and JeffH (Paypal) seem to be highly involved. [1]: https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/graphs/contributors https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/graphs/contributors [2]: https://www.w3.org/blog/webauthn/2018/01/11/meeting-minutes-2018/ https://www.w3.org/blog/webauthn/2018/01/11/meeting-minutes-... EDIT: add forgotten link
- colemickens 8y ago
  What is "this proprietary Azure/AD vendor lock-in" that you refer to? How is Azure AD more proprietary than AWS SSO, etc?
Someone1234 8y ago
Because you'd need a cross-platform, cross-machine, cross-device key management infrastructure and browser support that simply doesn't exist. Even if you contrast it against something like e.g. LastPass or Keepass, you're still missing a ton of infrastructure.
tracker1 8y ago
Beyond what the other comments mention... there's also the fact that most home users only use a single browser, and user account for everyone in the family.

djrogers 8y ago

More specifically, they're introducing passwordless login with FIDO2, as Windows had had passwordless logins with certs and CAC cards for ages.

pg_bot 8y ago

Glad to see greater adoption of Yubikeys, however there is still a long way to go. Speaking from experience writing a u2f_auth client library, browser support is still nascent and hacky. Edge, safari, and AWS would need to adopt it before I would truly consider it mainstream. If anyone is considering adopting Yubikeys in their organization using a language that is not supported by one of their client libraries my email is in my profile and I would glad to help out to the best of my ability.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

So my biggest question here is: Is this Azure only? Each announcement about it seems to indicate that I might not be able to use this key with my local account PC. Specifically, I have one use case computer where I have no screen, and getting through Windows login without it can be troublesome. I'd love to use this key to unlock it instead, but it's an offline machine. I had this plan with Yubikey for Windows Hello, which has been out a while, and I bought a Yubikey, and discovered it could only unlock my Windows machine if it was locked (not logged out), which defeated the purpose entirely.

fl0wenol 8y ago
Unfortunately it only works with Azure (at the minimum AD federation with Azure if you have some on-prem)
- youdontknowtho 8y ago
  You can use other identity providers for Azure AD. Shibboleth is supported, F5 and Ping are certified, there are others. If you use a different LDAP system than AD you can also sync your identities to Azure AD. OpenLDAP or one of the commercial vendors. It might be a little more elbow grease, but it works.

tahw 8y ago

Ad companies that specialize in re-targeting are going to have an absolute blast with this!

Xylakant 8y ago
How? Login is not automatic, you need to tap the key. So unless you tap the key each time you view an ad, the ad company gets nothing.

BartBoch 8y ago

Two things - is there really need for them to be this large? They also look vulnerable? Maybe its just the look, but the blue one looks like it won't survive proper stress test... And second thing - is exposing connector safe against mechanical damage? Will it withstand constantly being scratched by keys?

pg_bot 8y ago
There is the "nano" version available which is a lot smaller than the one advertised. The ones that I own have held up just fine for the past year on my keychain. https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4-nano https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4-n...
- BartBoch 8y ago
  This size is much better, but I assume it lacks the "touch" protection against remote attacks, like the other ones? I still wonder about the exposed connector - what its durability. After all, I would like for such a tool to serve me for years fault-free.
  - lovelettr 8y ago
    I personally have the nano version. > but I assume it lacks the "touch" protection against remote attacks It has the touch protection. There is a small strip of metal that protrudes beyond the USB port that you touch. > what its durability I've used it daily for about a year. Granted this is not "years" but so far it still feels very solid.
    - BartBoch 8y ago
      Sounds good then. I am ready to test one of them. Thanks!
  - GordonS 8y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, but could you explain what "touch" protection is please?

vzaliva 8y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but passwordless login is a single-factor authentication and less secure than MFA. Depending on whenever hardware key is more or less secure than the password, the mass adoption of this could make things LESS secure.

Xylakant 8y ago
I would expect things to be more secure in many cases. People are pretty good at keeping physical items somewhat safe and notice when they’re gone. Yubikeys cannot easily be cloned. The password cannot be attacked remotely. 2FA is certainly safer, though.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Passwords are utterly broken. All the entropy of memorizable passwords among humans have probably been extracted by this point. All they give you is a false sense of security. The password portion of 2FA is mostly theater, conditioned on the notion that passwords are broken. Hardware keys is the way of the future.
  - d4l3k 8y ago
    Except that passwords at least protect you if your hardware key is stolen. Using just a hardware key seems similarly risky to just using a password.
    - pishpash 8y ago
      What you need is a mechanism to detect loss of contact with the human and revoke. One way is to require several hardware tokens to combine their entropy to authenticate. Again, don't make a password be a part of this, use another token.
    - e1ven 8y ago
      Exactly - It's similar reason to the crypto keys use passphrases.
    - 8y ago

Tomte 8y ago

Okay, so I have two Yubico U2F keys and two other U2F keys so far. I don't think I'll buy a fifth and sixth anytime soon. But hopefully U2F will actually work in non-Chrome browsers in the near future.

Spone 8y ago
It already works in Firefox (behind a flag), but sadly some websites explicitly target Chrome...
- Tomte 8y ago
  Exactly. In practice it doesn't work. I have a few web sites where I'm using U2F, none of those works with Firefox.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  FF traditionally required a plugin, I think native support is recent?
  - mcbain 8y ago
    It was added in Firefox 57. Works fine for me.
bostik 8y ago
> But hopefully U2F will actually work in non-Chrome browsers in the near future. I would guess you're referring to being able to log in to gmail (or anything in G Suite) with U2F from Firefox. U2F is already available in the most recent version. See "security.webauth.*" keys in about:config. It just won't work with Google, at least not yet. Google's implementation predates webauth by a pretty fair margin, and from what I have learned, is different in small but important ways from the standard. So we have a situation that drips irony: we have a U2F standard, usable via a standard authentication mechanism - and incompatible with the very web property that drove the concerted push for the technology's adoption.
- 8y ago

pishpash 8y ago

Good. After all the roundabout bullshit of "factors" ("2FA") and password managers, people have finally come to their senses that physical tokens are a very natural evolution of analog keys and the only real security, and should have been used from the get-go.

tracker1 8y ago
Keys are not the only real security... real security includes something you are, something you have, and something you know. Having something like this combined with the something you know (passphrase) would be real closer security. Now anyone with your token can access everything that key gets access to, without you needing to be there, or sharing a passphrase. That's less secure imho.
- xur17 8y ago
  A lot of these devices allow you to configure a pin code that is required to unlock the device before use, which effectively provides a second factor. Also, stealing a fido device requires physical theft and can't be duplicated, so the owner would likely know if it was stolen.
- emlun 8y ago
  As xur17 points out, these devices support an on-device PIN like smart cards. The protocol also has support for future devices with biometric authentication, which could give you all three factors in one device.

fabian2k 8y ago

What I'd find interesting is using U2F (or FIDO2, which seems to be an evolution of this) as a second factor for SSH logins. But that doesn't seem possible without changes to SSH itself. And I hope that this might trigger more widespread support for U2F and similar mechanisms in browsers and websites.

floatboth 8y ago
No need to touch SSH itself, PAM is a thing (unless you're on OpenBSD). Here's an example of pam-u2f with OpenSSH: https://aprilmacdonald.com/two-factor-ssh-authentication-with-u2f-hardware-security-key/ https://aprilmacdonald.com/two-factor-ssh-authentication-wit... I actually use a Yubikey for SSH in a different way: with gpg-agent. E.g. https://blog.habets.se/2013/02/GPG-and-SSH-with-Yubikey-NEO.html https://blog.habets.se/2013/02/GPG-and-SSH-with-Yubikey-NEO....
- jlgaddis 8y ago
  > PAM is a thing (unless you're on OpenBSD) And if you are on OpenBSD, there's login_yubikey [0] (although it uses OTP instead of U2F). [0]: https://man.openbsd.org/login_yubikey.8 https://man.openbsd.org/login_yubikey.8

belst 8y ago

So this needs a new yubikey? I can have passwordless login on linux right now with my old yubikey.

emlun 8y ago
Depends on what features you want. The old U2F YubiKeys are compatible as 2nd factor keys, but they don't support the passwordless (PIN) or username-less (user ID stored on device) use cases.

BoppreH 8y ago

Did they improve the stories for recovery ("I lost my device") and revocation ("my device has been stolen")? As far as I knew you had to buy 2 devices to have a chance of recovery, and Fido 1 explicitly said "revocation is something that needs to be resolved by each website that authenticates users", which is just asking for trouble. I would love to have a hardware (or even phone-based) alternative to passwords, with no third-party and better privacy, but I feel like this solution only handles the happy path. For an example of a happy-path-only system that makes me nervous, look at Google Authenticator. Recovery is made with backup codes, but they are also "resolved by each website" (https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/167563/where-to-find-google-authenticator-backup-codes https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/167563/where-to...), which often means no support at all. Not to mention having to create a new backup after creating a new account. I still use Google Authenticator myself, but I dread the day I lose my phone. If the protocol doesn't handle recovery/authentication, the fallback is a trusted third party (e.g. email) or legal identity (e.g. scanned passport). Aside from being a huge hassle and creating a weak point, it weakens the user's privacy.

Ajedi32 8y ago
Neither of those problems (lost key, compromised key) are anything new. Why wouldn't sites just handle them the same way they currently handle revoking/resetting passwords?
- BoppreH 8y ago
  Because the current way sucks. 99% of the websites (I have accounts on) rely on my email for recovery and revocation. But my inbox is not an impenetrable fortress, it's a communication channel; every device I own has access to it, and could be used as a backdoor to my entire digital life. Then there's the risk of the third-party (Google banning me, being hacked, subpoena'd, etc), the privacy factor (see the Ashley Madison leaks), the often custom code implemented by each website...
  - noja 8y ago
    > every device I own is has access to it and this sucks. Why can't I use my google account with my tablet without it automatically getting access to gmail sync?

floatboth 8y ago

Can someone explain why CTAP was created? What exactly was wrong / not enough about the original U2F protocol?

Boulth 8y ago
I wonder the same. I see the differences in protocols here and there but no fundamental things changed.
emlun 8y ago
Some differences: - CTAP2 supports "user verification", such as PIN or biometric authentication locally on the hardware key. This enables using the key as both 1st and 2nd factor without need for a server-side password. - CTAP2 supports storing the private key along with some metadata on the device, whereas U2F instead encrypts the private key and stores the ciphertext on the server. While the encryption approach allows for simpler hardware and an unlimited number of registrations, the local storage approach allows login without even having to type (or even have) a username. CTAP2 supports both. - CTAP2 has an extensions framework in which an authentication vendor and server can cooperate to implement custom features without the browser having to understand them. - CTAP2 - or at least the companion web API, Web Authentication - is compatible with more existing TPMs and such hardware. For example, it's theoretically possible that some Android phones could receive software upgrades that turn their fingerprint sensors into WebAuthn authenticators.

dogma1138 8y ago

Would be interesting if this would become popular one downside I see to this is that if law enforcement get their hands on your token they can unlock the device. Also as the token can be regarded as a key rather than a password a court would be able to legally compel you to surrender it without invoking much debate regarding laws against self incrimination (e.g. the fifth).

krupan 8y ago
Can't law enforcement now just ask Google or Facebook or whoever for the information they need without needing your password (or future token)?
- dogma1138 8y ago
  It's not that simple, firstly some Google and Facebook services are E2E encrypted which means that they cannot comply. This also goes well beyond just Facebook and Google and if you use it to lock a physical device like a phone or a laptop that isn't something Google or Facebook would be able to help law enforcement with. Also while I don't want to make a statement or start a debate on the level of compliance and attitude that Google and the rest have towards search warrants (because it's not relevant and I don't have sufficient knowledge to actually form an informed opinion on the matter). Google and Facebook's legal departments have more funding than most state attorneys yet alone local DA's if they want to fight on your behalf (or on the behalf of their business model) in court they would be able to do so much more effectively than you ever could. Google and Facebook also require a full and lengthy process with FIDO tokens they can do it on the spot, heck they are legally able to do so if you either agree to a search or law enforcement has an alternative sufficient basis to invoke a lawful warrantless search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrantless_searches_in_the_United_States#Exceptions_to_the_search_warrant_requirement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrantless_searches_in_the_Un... TLDR; Officer: May I search your vehicle You: Yes At that point they are legally are allowed to take the FIDO token from your keychain and unlock your laptop.

nikolay 8y ago

No USB-C version and no way to upgrade my other 4+ YubiKeys I've got for more than $50 each! I think YubiKey has been abusing its monopoly recently! They've been working on this for quite some time and clearly new they're not going to make their old premium keys support it so that people can waste time and money to upgrade! Is there an alternative more conscious company - I'd pay even $200 for the piece of mind that I won't have to change this key 1-2 times per year! P.S. Obviously, no. Neither Nitrokey [0] supports it, nor it's a sturdy one! [0]: https://www.nitrokey.com/ https://www.nitrokey.com/

mynameisvlad 8y ago
I will point out, NitroKey also doesn't have a USB-C version.
- nikolay 8y ago
  True, nobody seems to offer USB-C. Also, I have to point out that YubiKey 4C [0] is not sturdy either unlike the rest - it disintegrated on my keychain in less than two months without any abuse. [0]: https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c
pfg 8y ago
YubiKeys are non-upgradable by design. This is occasionally annoying when new standards come out and you need to go buy new keys (which is not something that's gonna happen a lot), but it significantly reduces the attack surface of these devices. They've been pretty good about giving out free replacement keys whenever major flaws have been found, and webauthn is pretty good about remaining backwards-compatible with U2F keys, so I don't think it's something they handled particularly badly.
- nikolay 8y ago
  I get that, but my point was that they just released expensive new products knowing they'd be obsolete in just a couple of months and people will have to throw old ones in the garbage and buy new even more expensive ones. I do not doubt that a product with an immutable core and mutable interfaces is both possible and even more secure as when flaws are discovered (like last year), some may decide not to replace them - even with free replacement. I spent over $100 just last year, and I think this is a bit too much. I give my old keys to my kids, but, still, I'd appreciate some form of subscription service, which both reduces my recurring cost and possibly improves Yubico's bottom line, too, primarily by building loyalty instead of pissing customers off.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

My problem is that Microsoft doesn't allow swapping in and out of authentication plugins like PAM. I work primarily in a Windows shop, and I got the other co-workers in Linux because PAM supports seamless multi-factor auth. I would have went Windows, but its too obfuscated or hard to do that. LinOTP works very well. And LinOTP works with a wide variety of tokens. Don't be locked to a single vendor.

ShroudedNight 8y ago
> Microsoft doesn't allow swapping in and out of authentication plugins like PAM. FWIW, that's not strictly true. See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt158211(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt1... I don't have enough experience to comment one way or the other about its difficulty.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Well, this certainly surprises me. I know last I looked, there was some discussion about MFA and requiring Azure. In the environment I work in, I'm not able to use services outside a very limited list, or I have to roll my own using established technologies (FedRAMP). So Azure is right out. So was using Amazon Directory Services. I know my colleagues are much more familiar with Windows, whereas I.. (look at username, relevant!). My solution, after assessing that Windows couldn't do 2 (or 3) factor, and it was stuck at login/password and some firewall blocking IP's, I knew what I had to do. And that meant Linux for the bastions, and LinOTP and appropriate config options to make it work. I was kind, and didn't inflict a AAA stack of "kerb, ldap, radius, and shib" on the Windows admins :) Well, that and I didn't want to be the sole maintainer of that system.
  - ShroudedNight 8y ago
    To be fair, the only reason I knew of this at all is because of a brief patronage of a library in Belgium during a trip I took in the summer of '99. The computer systems of said library used a bizarre system of time-limited authentication tokens stored on floppy disks that were used during the Windows log-on process. I was curious how it might have worked.

krupan 8y ago

The conversation here is blowing my mind. People are actually worried that their yubikey might get lost or stolen when likely most of your passwords are already all over the internet. I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password. Twitter! Not Joe's Auto-Body who's website is being run by a high-schooler, but one of the pioneers of internet companies. They messed up. Your password is not safer "in your head" than a private key because it is not only in your head (who keeps all passwords in their head anymore anyway?) Private keys are way, way more secure than passwords for that reason alone. You don't have to give anything secret to a third party. If that's the one problem this solves and revocation and recovery and 2-factor are all still as difficult and broken as they are now with passwords that's still a huge win. EDIT: more thoughts. I also really hope that hardware tokens like a yubikey are not required for every site or app. I'd like to be able to keep private keys on my phone or laptop for some things (how many of us keep our ssh keys exclusively on hardware tokens?).

georgyo 8y ago
Still reading the comments, but is anyone actually saying passwords are more secure in general? I think most people are saying that they get locked out of their account if they lose the token. How do you validate your account is your account if the only secret you have is lost? If you 100% require a hardware token, you need at least two and/or a method to auth that is not a hardware token so you can recover in a mode where you lost one. But on the security note. There are several types of security. Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet. Without any malware, I could pickup my friends keys and log into their account on my computer in seconds and without their knowledge. This is harder to do with a password. At the same time a password is much easier for someone who doesn't even know who I am to attack. It's why 2FA is so necessary, it helps defend against both methods of attack.
- krupan 8y ago
  "Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet." Are the people around you not on the internet? They are just a subset of that larger group, aren't they? Sorry if I'm not understanding your point there. And like I said in my edit, I really hope that Yubikey is not the one and only one way to store private keys. I personally would be perfectly happy, for most websites and apps, to manage keys just like I do for ssh. On my hard drive, backed up to another hard drive or two of mine, protected by a passphrase. I imagine most people would be pretty comfortable letting a service like lastpass manage most of their private keys for them, with multiple copies synced between devices and encrypted with a strong passphrase.

emlun 8y ago

I'd like to try to answer some common questions I see here: - Q: Doesn't passwordless mean single factor? Isn't that insecure? A: It could mean single- or two-factor. FIDO2 and the new YubiKeys support an on-device PIN that isn't shared with the server, like conventional smart cards. This allows the key to act as both "something you have" (the key itself) and "something you know" (the PIN for the key). The PIN is optional, though, so both the single factor and two factor use cases are possible. - Q: Is this Azure/Windows/AD only? A: This post highlights the partnership with Microsoft and the integration with their products, but FIDO2 is not Microsoft-only (and Yubico will not be the only key vendor). CTAP2, once finished, will be published as an open standard like U2F, and the accompanying Web Authentication API [1] (WIP) is an OS-agnostic W3C standard enabling the same features in browsers. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/ - Q: Will I need a new YubiKey? A: For passwordless (PIN) login, yes. However, existing YubiKeys with U2F support will be usable as a 2nd factor in Web Authentication, and sites that currently use U2F can upgrade to using the Web Authentication API without needing their users to re-enroll their keys. Full disclosure: I'm a Yubico engineer and one of the editors of the Web Authentication spec.

ahelwer 8y ago
What's the deal with lost yubikey user workflow? Rely on individual websites to give you a one-time recovery passcode that you then have to input into every website? I can't believe I'm taking UX cues from cryptocurrencies, but what about providing the user with a seed for the yubikey private key they can back-up offline then reinstall in a new yubikey? P.S. just ordered a yubikey security key, excited to add this additional layer to my own personal byzantine security labyrinth. Or maybe simplify it, who knows!
- closeparen 8y ago
  Recovery codes or 2 Yubikeys.
- krrrh 8y ago
  You can use Trezor or Ledger hardware wallets for U2F with recoverable seed words. Even if you go with a Yubikey, which has a better form factor, one of these is a pretty good backup device since they can be further backed up to paper.

lisper 8y ago

Here is a completely standalone (no server required) and self-contained (no dependencies) FIDO U2F test: https://github.com/rongarret/u2f-test https://github.com/rongarret/u2f-test

jimmcslim 8y ago

Anyone think that Apple is likely to add support for FIDO anytime soon?

zmarker 8y ago

This looks like another avenue for enhanced tracking of unique users. Don't give up your multiple passwords.

LammyL 8y ago

I wonder if we’ll get to the point of having two-factor passwordless authentication. Like you need two of the following methods to access a website (u2f/fido2, TOTP, SMS, Recovery codes, tls client certificate, etc.) and forego passwords altogether.

joering2 8y ago

Why can't I secure login with a fingerprint? Microsoft could have team up with Logitech like Sony with Erricson, and come up with a standard and put (mildly cheap) finger print reader on each sold keyboard and popularize open source standard for software implementation.

deleted 8y ago
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tialaramex 8y ago
Your fingerprint is not a key, it's an identity. So your design tells every place you sign in this way "I'm joering2". And if course if any of them want to log in somewhere else, they now know to say the same thing, "I'm joering2". I guess this is slightly easier than typing your email address? But it's not a security feature. The FIDO/U2F design is a cryptographic key enshrined as a physical key, so rather than "I'm joering2" it says: "I can prove I'm this particular key talking to your site again using mathematics". Which key? No way to know, but it's the same one as before. Google can't use the credentials it presents to them to get into Facebook and vice versa, the proof from yesterday is worthless today and so on.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  > Your fingerprint is not a key, it's an identity. Also, you can't revoke fingerprints when they're compromised more than 10 times (20 if you're willing to use your toes too).
- emlun 8y ago
  This. Though I'd like to add that FIDO2 does support fingerprints and other biometrics as an additional authentication factor - it all goes under the same abstract "user verification" umbrella as PIN does. The important distinction is that the PIN or fingerprint is never shared with the server - it's only used to unlock the private key - so it's much more difficult to steal.

aepiepaey 8y ago

It's too bad sshd never got support for U2F. Seems like the discussions just petered out. Maybe the introduction of FIDO2 will spark some interest in that again? https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319 https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319 Yes, sure, you could use pam-u2f, but that will never be as seamless as having it supported upstream in ssh. Or you could use the OTP mode instead, but that has other disadvantages (you have to depend on yubico's servers or run your own KSM+validation servers).

deleted 8y ago

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blablabla123 8y ago

I wonder if these Hardware key really make things better for the end-user. When using it even for login, people connect it to their laptops - that's what most people work with after all - and they must make sure they don't forget it there. As well they need to worry nobody steals it, whether it's on your laptop or you become a theft victim on the street. In the latter case the thieves might know what a Yubikey is and ask you for the pin. Not sure what problem this solves. But I have the impression we're converting a virtual problem into a physical problem. To be honest I prefer to save keys on laptop drives, that's more difficult to steal, especially when using an encrypted disk.

Install_Gentoo 8y ago

Why is this a "new" thing? I have my sisters laptop to do that with linux mint. ???

IOT_Apprentice 8y ago

why isn't a phone with a secure enclave (or similar) the focus, instead of something that doesn't work on mobile?