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You can use it with Chromium on Linux, but there's two parts to WebAuthn: the user-agent, and the client device/software that holds the key. So, WebAuthn shows
by aseipp 3y ago
You can use it with Chromium on Linux, but there's two parts to WebAuthn: the user-agent, and the client device/software that holds the key. So, WebAuthn shows you a QR code which you can scan. That happens on the user agent when you try to log in. It's no different than Windows.
But the client software is a bit different. The client software scans the QR code and then provides proof you're the user you claim to be (normal pubkey cryptography) and then the user-agent and server do the rest of the dance. You can look at the spec, I can't remember all the details. But then the question is, what client software do you use?
Most people use their phone for this part. The Phone scans the QR code. There's an implementation advantage for most phones: they can put the key in cryptographic storage on the device; this is one thing most bog-standard PCs are behind on (except Apple with the Secure Enclave, which was inherited from iPhones.) But again, there's no need for the crypto storage here. That's an implementation detail. Again, it just needs to scan the QR code and provide the proof. How that happens is totally arbitrary.
So in theory you can use any software that can just scan a QR code and abide by the spec, for the second part. You could write your own code to store the keys in your GPG keychain, or whatever. But in practice, phones have the most mature implementation today. Most people use phones. They're the most robust and portable solution for most people right now. Presumably "sometime soon" things like 1Password, BitWarden, KeePass, and all those others -- their software will support scanning the QR code and then providing proofs. They'll sync your encrypted database or whatever too instead of using a hardware crypto enclave, but again: implementation details.
So there's nothing about "blessed devices" here or whatever. I think in practice it's just that this is all relatively detailed and security sensitive components, both the user-agent and client software. So those companies are in the best place to implement all that shit. They also tend to have the advantage of their moat; it's easy to onboard Android users via Chrome or Apple users via Safari. It's relatively new, and so the demand for alternative software solutions hasn't reached any critical mass, either.
Also: all of this change the login model a bit, so you need to be able to e.g. associate multiple keys with one account. That's a server-side thing; maybe you need a schema change for example. There's some effort to be spent here by all parties.
Firefox does not support Passkeys at the moment on Linux. Chrome and Chromium do, I believe.
You could possibly hack some shell scripts to read a QR code from a screenshot and then put/retrieve the key from `pass` or whatever.
- hooverd 3y agoThank you for the explainer. From a lot of what I read it seemed like you had to use an Apple/Google/MS keychain but I'm glad that's not the case.