2 ms·
> Passkeys takes the view that social engineering and malware attacks cannot be prevented so long as the secret is retrievable from the HSM into an unmanaged fi
by xg15 1y ago
> Passkeys takes the view that social engineering and malware attacks cannot be prevented so long as the secret is retrievable from the HSM into an unmanaged file, clipboard, etc.
Yeah, I know that Passkeys takes that view. I'm questioning that view.
We have precedent in form of SSH, PGP, S/MIME, TLS client certificates (or actually even just regular TLS certificates) and all kinds of crypto wallets. Have there been any actual studies how many private keys in those systems were sucessfully exfiltrated through phishing?
Because this justification sounds an awful lot like an excuse for lock-in and control creep - like the mandatory auto-updates that were also promoted in the name of security and now are frequently used to push through anti-features that go against the interests of the users.
- altairprime 1y agoCrypto wallet malware is widespread, SSH and AWS key theft is a regular and successful target of Python module malware, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791058 is the most recent post (yesterday) I can find, suggesting 200,000 impacted in a single malware instance. On average there are hundreds to thousands a year, but I don’t know their theft volume. How many need to be impacted before the interests of user security should be given precedence over the interests of user liberties? Is there a hard line amount or is it fuzzy? Is it in the thousands, millions, or billions? You’re definitely asking an excellent line of questioning, in my view. IS all of this Passkeys crap worth it? Will it make a significant and meaningful difference? That has to be a set of questions that the W3C has presumably studied, and if you’re lacking for sources to begin research, I would check their drafts and discussions first. I’m not the right person to look for studies pro/con to your viewpoint, though: this topic, as with most social morality topics, is essentially academic to me — which is one of the great joys of being asocial, as I love that academia, but also means that I can’t construct a working theory of mind to support someone else’s viewpoint, pro or con, without it being uncanny valley broken and weird. I see a lot of people upset about this topic and it’s transparent enough for me to lay it out plainly, and I care about people en masse and I want to see these discussions progress beyond “this sucks” reflexive disregard and towards - for examples - “is there any better way technically”, “what led to the sacrifice of liberty deemed acceptable”, and “is it appropriate to be so cynical about human beings when they’re their own biggest enemy”.
- teddyh 1y agoThose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- conradev 1y agoThe amount of cryptocurrency stolen due to exposed keys on the filesystem is likely staggering