5 ms·

> Also, that $10 security key is just a step away from being your national ID card. That's how bank logins work here. No passwords allowed. Er, wouldn't that b

by md_ 5y ago

> Also, that $10 security key is just a step away from being your national ID card. That's how bank logins work here. No passwords allowed. Er, wouldn't that be a good thing? Identities cannot be linked to the same physical FIDO key across multiple relying parties, so what's the concern?

krageon 5y ago
> Identities cannot be linked Yes, they can. Quite obviously they can and all it takes is even a modicum of cooperation. We have already extensively seen corporations love to cooperate when it comes to compromising information that belongs to you.
- md_ 5y ago
  Compliant FIDO2 keys guarantee unlinkability even against colluding relying parties. See https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.0-rd-20180702/fido-security-ref-v2.0-rd-20180702.html https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.0-rd-20180702/fido-se..., specifically "security goal 4", and the unique authentication keys requirement.
  - krageon 5y ago
    Against any two, not any number.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Did you look at how this is actually achieved? Attackers (even if they control several major outfits like say Microsoft) are not going to succeed in a correlation attack. Roughly what they're doing is like trying to guess the AES keys. This is in stark contrast to passwords of course, where correlation is so high that haveibeenpwned is worth existing...
    - md_ 5y ago
      Seriously? Please, explain to me how an arbitrary number of RPs can collude to link a FIDO2 identity.
mindslight 5y ago
Yes, that is how the crypto works from a technical perspective. But the places that want to know your identity for casual surveillance will not settle for just a pseudonymous FIDO exchange. What will happen is there will be a handful of companies that you directly authenticate to with FIDO (eg Google), who require a bunch of personal information to create an account, that then vouch for your larger identity to third parties. The problem is not technical - there are many ways to replace website auth passwords that would be better. The problem is the business desires all but guarantee newly developed methods will leak more of our personal information. Is a business more likely to do the work of implementing FIDO themselves, or to tie into Sign in with Bigcorp? Given what is already happening, that answer is clear. Simple per-site passwords continue to exist due to the momentum of everyone understanding them, despite their drawbacks for the surveillance industry. Regardless of what other methods are offered, we should aim to preserve the existence of the password method as at least one of the choices, such that we can freely decide whether those other methods actually benefit us. The growing insistence on snake oil "2FA" is already bad enough.
- md_ 5y ago
  To restate, I think your argument is that by making authn more complex, standards like WebAuthn will push towards "Identity as a Service" platforms like Firebase, Okta, etc, and that this concentrates power in the hands of those providers. To an extent I think this is a fair argument, but it strikes me as somewhat of a Luddite one as well: yes, the better technology is also more complex, but most of the time users are simply more secure by developers choosing IaaS providers! At the limit, you could argue against developer guidelines to use SSL or salted password storage, because those are "complex" and "encourage adoption of common providers." I don't think these security mechanisms are significant drivers of tech consolidation, and of all the things to complain about, the payoff for users--increased security--is hard to oppose!
  - mindslight 5y ago
    When it comes to surveillance companies developing software, I am a Luddite by default. They can't help but incorporate biases that destroy end user autonomy, because they're only concerned about advancing their own perspective. In general, I don't view "security" under the wing of a company as a goal worth striving for, because companies are the long-term attackers we need to worry about! If it was guaranteed that say FIDO would stop sites demanding phone numbers to do snake oil "2FA", then I'd be fully supportive. But from what I've witnessed surveillace companies won't take steps that don't benefit them - why would they ever stop demanding phone numbers now that they can? And so whatever it turns out being, I can only imagine that "passwordless" will be similarly abused ("never let a good crisis go to waste"). At the very least it will create another configuration speed bump that interrupts workflows based around trying to compartmentalize the surveillance industry (eg I only run web browsers in VMs). If you really want to drive adoption of FIDO, then instead of pushing hardware tokens (and corresponding heavyweight process), Mozilla should create a software FIDO key within the browser. That is something that I can see evolving features that help users rather than restrict them. It would then be up to an end user whether to use a hardware token in place of that, iff they determine that a given account is that important.

by md_ 5y ago

krageon 5y ago

> Identities cannot be linked Yes, they can. Quite obviously they can and all it takes is even a modicum of cooperation. We have already extensively seen corporations love to cooperate when it comes to compromising information that belongs to you.

md_ 5y ago
Compliant FIDO2 keys guarantee unlinkability even against colluding relying parties. See https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.0-rd-20180702/fido-security-ref-v2.0-rd-20180702.html https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.0-rd-20180702/fido-se..., specifically "security goal 4", and the unique authentication keys requirement.
- krageon 5y ago
  Against any two, not any number.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Did you look at how this is actually achieved? Attackers (even if they control several major outfits like say Microsoft) are not going to succeed in a correlation attack. Roughly what they're doing is like trying to guess the AES keys. This is in stark contrast to passwords of course, where correlation is so high that haveibeenpwned is worth existing...
  - md_ 5y ago
    Seriously? Please, explain to me how an arbitrary number of RPs can collude to link a FIDO2 identity.

mindslight 5y ago

Yes, that is how the crypto works from a technical perspective. But the places that want to know your identity for casual surveillance will not settle for just a pseudonymous FIDO exchange. What will happen is there will be a handful of companies that you directly authenticate to with FIDO (eg Google), who require a bunch of personal information to create an account, that then vouch for your larger identity to third parties. The problem is not technical - there are many ways to replace website auth passwords that would be better. The problem is the business desires all but guarantee newly developed methods will leak more of our personal information. Is a business more likely to do the work of implementing FIDO themselves, or to tie into Sign in with Bigcorp? Given what is already happening, that answer is clear. Simple per-site passwords continue to exist due to the momentum of everyone understanding them, despite their drawbacks for the surveillance industry. Regardless of what other methods are offered, we should aim to preserve the existence of the password method as at least one of the choices, such that we can freely decide whether those other methods actually benefit us. The growing insistence on snake oil "2FA" is already bad enough.

md_ 5y ago
To restate, I think your argument is that by making authn more complex, standards like WebAuthn will push towards "Identity as a Service" platforms like Firebase, Okta, etc, and that this concentrates power in the hands of those providers. To an extent I think this is a fair argument, but it strikes me as somewhat of a Luddite one as well: yes, the better technology is also more complex, but most of the time users are simply more secure by developers choosing IaaS providers! At the limit, you could argue against developer guidelines to use SSL or salted password storage, because those are "complex" and "encourage adoption of common providers." I don't think these security mechanisms are significant drivers of tech consolidation, and of all the things to complain about, the payoff for users--increased security--is hard to oppose!
- mindslight 5y ago
  When it comes to surveillance companies developing software, I am a Luddite by default. They can't help but incorporate biases that destroy end user autonomy, because they're only concerned about advancing their own perspective. In general, I don't view "security" under the wing of a company as a goal worth striving for, because companies are the long-term attackers we need to worry about! If it was guaranteed that say FIDO would stop sites demanding phone numbers to do snake oil "2FA", then I'd be fully supportive. But from what I've witnessed surveillace companies won't take steps that don't benefit them - why would they ever stop demanding phone numbers now that they can? And so whatever it turns out being, I can only imagine that "passwordless" will be similarly abused ("never let a good crisis go to waste"). At the very least it will create another configuration speed bump that interrupts workflows based around trying to compartmentalize the surveillance industry (eg I only run web browsers in VMs). If you really want to drive adoption of FIDO, then instead of pushing hardware tokens (and corresponding heavyweight process), Mozilla should create a software FIDO key within the browser. That is something that I can see evolving features that help users rather than restrict them. It would then be up to an end user whether to use a hardware token in place of that, iff they determine that a given account is that important.