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I'm pretty sure that's what was being referred to when the author mentioned corporate drones carrying around fobs. Generally those fobs contain the keys for PKI

I'm pretty sure that's what was being referred to when the author mentioned corporate drones carrying around fobs. Generally those fobs contain the keys for PKI auth in secure-hardware form. However, having had to deal with using these myself, I'm not sure I would agree that PKI auth is "sane", "obvious", or "flexible". As for your other points, without a hardware-secure token, I don't think PKI is secure in the least. You're one zero-day browser crack away from revealing your private key. The solution to that of course is to require a passphrase, and oops, we're back to the original problem.

drdaeman 12y ago
I think, none of the possible auth schemes without hardware security modules or multi-factor auth are prone to zero-day browser vulnerabilities. To compromise the PKI to actually reveal the key material, one must have pretty severe vulnerability - which is less likely to happen, if compared to typical cross-site cookie-stealing hacks. Uh, and many desktop PCs have TPM chip available already - if those aren't banned by your country's import rules (unfortunately, my country does so). Those could be well abused by evil corporations in treacherous computing schemes, but they also have good uses. Probably not safe against TLAs, but since those chips hold the keys and do the crypto by themselves, they're very unlikely to reveal keys even in case of browser exploits. Malicious sign requests can happen, but that's about it - to me it seems to be much better than with every other approach to auth. So, even if you don't have a fancy USB-pluggable HSM stick it's well possible you still already have fairly secure way to store key material.
hamburglar 12y ago
> You're one zero-day browser crack away from revealing your private key. You're still better off than any password scheme, which is often attacked from the server side. And the lovely thing about the PKI method is that you can invest as much or as little as you want into protecting the private key and have the server not care even a little. On the weak end is the unprotected private key file on your hard drive, followed by a private key that's passphrase-protected (and even with this, there's a spectrum of configurable behavior governing how long it stays decrypted), followed by private keys on a physical device, followed by a physical device that requires two-factor access.

drdaeman 12y ago

I think, none of the possible auth schemes without hardware security modules or multi-factor auth are prone to zero-day browser vulnerabilities. To compromise the PKI to actually reveal the key material, one must have pretty severe vulnerability - which is less likely to happen, if compared to typical cross-site cookie-stealing hacks. Uh, and many desktop PCs have TPM chip available already - if those aren't banned by your country's import rules (unfortunately, my country does so). Those could be well abused by evil corporations in treacherous computing schemes, but they also have good uses. Probably not safe against TLAs, but since those chips hold the keys and do the crypto by themselves, they're very unlikely to reveal keys even in case of browser exploits. Malicious sign requests can happen, but that's about it - to me it seems to be much better than with every other approach to auth. So, even if you don't have a fancy USB-pluggable HSM stick it's well possible you still already have fairly secure way to store key material.

hamburglar 12y ago

> You're one zero-day browser crack away from revealing your private key. You're still better off than any password scheme, which is often attacked from the server side. And the lovely thing about the PKI method is that you can invest as much or as little as you want into protecting the private key and have the server not care even a little. On the weak end is the unprotected private key file on your hard drive, followed by a private key that's passphrase-protected (and even with this, there's a spectrum of configurable behavior governing how long it stays decrypted), followed by private keys on a physical device, followed by a physical device that requires two-factor access.