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Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.
by rglullis 11mo ago
Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.
- beeflet 11mo agothey already manage passwords and passkeys. It isn't that complicated.
- rglullis 11mo agohttps://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- beeflet 11mo agohow is it any more difficult than taking care of a password?
- rglullis 11mo agoIt is not about the difficulty, it's the potential consequences. People also take care of their house keys and their wallets, but If I lose the keys to my house, it isn't automatically taken over by squatters and if I lose my ID card I can issue a new one quickly. What happens if you lose the cryptographic key to your nostr account? Who do you call for help?
- verdverm 11mo agoCan I click a link to reset my keys? What happens when the key is lost, and the consequences like "lose all your money" or "lose your account access" are non-starters, as someone who owns a hardware key for my email account Multi-sig wallets are even more complicated and not for normies
- strbean 11mo agoHopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately. It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).
- rglullis 11mo agoThat also goes to the other extreme. For all the faults of current Fediverse software implementations, it at least gives more options than nostr. If you don't care about controlling your own identity, you can use someone else's server. Nostr doesn't give you that, it's all or nothing.
- bawolff 11mo ago> Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately. Passports have had keys in them for a while now (so-called "e-passports")
- lxgr 11mo agoThese keys are intentionally not usable for non-repudiable signatures.
- dahrkael 11mo agoeuropean IDs already have a chip with your personal keys and you can use that to log into any state operated service
- pjc50 11mo agoThere is no European ID. Please specify individual countries (I think this is just Estonia at the moment?)
- attila-lendvai 11mo agohas been the case for Hungarian ID cards for a decade now, but it was never really used, except maybe by burorats in gov offices to access their systems. but no one understands it, including the people who need to issue new signing keys. it didn't get anywhere really. it was just a good opportunity for a lot of taxpayer money to... "lose its taxpayer money nature" (actual phrase by an actual politician when cornered by questions). and now they are "moving on" to an app that must be installed on your phone to access more and more services. ID2030 is roaring on worldwide... soon mandatory iris scans, vaccine implants, and who knows when they will try to roll out mandatory brain implants against thought crimes. the more i think about the sign of the beast (as an atheist), the more sense it makes.
- noman-land 11mo agoNormies manage their house keys just fine. Obviously crypto keys come with different challenges but that's a UX problem. People losing their house keys is not generally an Earth shattering event. Losing a crypto key doesn't have to be either. A wallet is easier to lose than a bank vault, but it also holds less money for the same reason. Crypto keys can be designed the same way, with high importance keys managed by safer means like m of n schemes mixed with traditional "hard" storage in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes or whatever, while less important keys can be treated in a more relaxed fashion.
- acdha 11mo agoThis analogy misses the entire system keeping house keys manageable. If you lose your keys, a locksmith can help you regain access cheaply and quickly because there’s an entire legal system allowing you to prove that you are the legitimate owner. The system you describe for crypto keys is not only significantly harder to use but also lacks that cushioned landing if any part of that fails. Any teenager with poor impulse control can toss a brick through the window and gain access to my house, maybe even grab the spare keys, but they couldn’t occupy it for very long or transfer it to a new owner, which is a significant risk mitigation compared to those crypto keys even before you consider how many more attackers you have to worry about online – there’s no real-world analog to some guy phishing someone on the other side of the planet to post ads or make fake reviews, secure in the knowledge that their local police don’t care.
- Barrin92 11mo ago>People losing their house keys is not generally an Earth shattering event. yes because if you lose your house keys you don't lose your property, precisely because there is an entire legal and governmental apparatus securing it, the exact thing the crypto people first try get rid off and then reinvent (shoddily) when they inevitably discover that nobody wants to live in the jungle
- throwawaysoxjje 11mo agoNot really sure this analogy works since the usability of my house and everything in it is unrelated to having them. The house keys only make getting into my house easier.
- sneak 11mo agohttps://sneak.berlin/20181022/sneaks-law/ https://sneak.berlin/20181022/sneaks-law/ sneak’s law: “Users can not and will not securely manage key material.”
- bawolff 11mo agoPeople seem to manage their whatsapp (or signal, etc) keys just fine. Because its an app that just stores it as a file and doesn't tell you about it. So i think there are viable solutions here. It mostly just means having an app to manage the keys for you.
- rglullis 11mo agoBoth signal and WhatsApp punt key revocation and recovery to phone number verification, so ultimately these keys belong to phone number provider.
- bawolff 11mo agoSure, there are costs involved in the trade off, but the benefit is a system that actually works for the average user.
- rglullis 11mo agoMy point is that is this is not a trade-off but a complete violation of the principles that are used to justify the existence of nostr. Nostr's whole shtick is about "users owning their keys". If I can not change the keys used on WhatsApp or Signal, I do not own them. They are not in the same class, so the comparison is moot.
- bawolff 11mo agoI dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that. But honestly one of the reasons why these sorts of apps dont take off, is they rigidly adhere to security properties that dont make sense and nobody really cares about, at the expense of making an unusable app.
- rglullis 10mo ago> I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that. Matrix clients have e2ee encryption like Signal or WhatsApp. Every single one of my close contacts that I have on my server have ignored or misunderstood the instructions to download and store the recovery key when they first access the servers. I have customers on my support channel who keep trying different clients (Element, ElementX, Fractal) and every time they fail to validate their sessions. Then I have customers who got their phone stolen and then come asking me to either delete the data on their phone. --- There is no magic about "putting it in a app to manage it". If any "app approach" you come up with creates a sandbox between user and device, then the user can not even see their private keys, then they effectively do not own it. If you are doing "nostr, but with keys sandboxed on the device", then you are just recreating Signal - which is not decentralized - then what's the point?