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A comment on Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by JoshTriplett on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @08:43PM (#16173925)
The original Persona proposal had the concept of browser-based identity. Your browser would provide secure authentication, and then Firefox Sync would let you bring the authentication credentials with you to other systems. You'd just click "sign in" on a site (or in the browser UI) and your browser would sign you in, with no other interaction required.

However, outside of a prototype addon, that approach never materialized. And without that, Persona didn't have a compelling use case except for people who didn't want to trust signing in via Facebook or Google or Twitter.

We're finally starting to see standards proposals that address this, and allow signing in via cryptographic authentication built into your browser. I hope to see those make OAuth obsolete for any use case other than API access to an account (e.g. "allow this site to integrate with Github").

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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by ubernostrum on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @08:57PM (#16173998)
Also, Persona was interesting for being one of the few actually user-friendly and usable deployments of public-key cryptography ever to exist.
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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by lifeisstillgood on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @08:46PM (#16173949)
> We're finally starting to see standards proposals that address this, and allow signing in via cryptographic

could you point us at these - would've very interested as thelack of PKI in the world does bother me

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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by JoshTriplett on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @08:58PM (#16174000)
https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/

Disclaimer: I have not reviewed this spec in detail yet, and my confidence in the W3C is not high.

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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by cpeterso on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @09:30PM (#16174162)
Firefox 60 will ship the WebAuthn API. Here's a Mozilla blog post with examples of how to use WebAuthn and FIDO U2F devices:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/using-hardware-token-based...

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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by JoshTriplett on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @10:11PM (#16174364)
Will it work with a key stored in the "software security device", rather than a hardware token?

For that matter, the description shown on that page suggests that it supports using the key on the hardware token as the only authentication factor. That seems dangerous. Unlike a key stored on an encrypted disk, a U2F key typically works for anyone who steals it. Firefox needs to use that key together with another key stored in the browser, or otherwise ensure that someone who steals the U2F key does not gain access to every account secured with WebAuthn.

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Re:Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem by cpeterso on Thursday January 18, 2018 @02:50AM (#16175431)
Yes, I think Firefox will support U2F "soft tokens". Code for a U2FSoftTokenManager was added in Firefox bug 1323339.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323339

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