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I'm not aware of any web APIs for secure key storage. That feels like something that would be of value, but coming up with a way to attest to the key being hard
by mjg59 5y ago
I'm not aware of any web APIs for secure key storage. That feels like something that would be of value, but coming up with a way to attest to the key being hardware-backed is hard to do without privacy impact - you need some sort of intrinsic hardware-tied key to validate that, and then anyone you do that validation with can tie a key back to the intrinsic key and associate accounts. The Trusted Computing Group tried to solve this with Privacy CAs, which were supposed to issue certificates for intermediate keys that could be randomly generated. But nobody's stepped up to run one, so we're left with Direct Anonymous Attestation, which it turns out may not be possible with the cryptographic features that TPMs provide.
Overall, hardware-backed identity is probably viable in enterprise scenarios where you don't have the same expectation that company-owned hardware will respect your privacy, and we don't have a great solution for doing it at consumer level, and that probably impairs our ability to offer any sort of browser-level API for it.