The point is that ssh keys lying around on your laptop aren't the greatest idea either. Where is the root of trust? The password you type to terminal if you encrypt them?

FIDO2 starts with the idea of safe defaults, where either client devices (Android, laptop TPM,...) store the keys safely, or dongle vendors (like us, SoloKeys). These have a business interest in doing their job properly.

But there's nothing preventing software implementations, it's an open standard in that respect (I do have other issues with it but your specific concern is unfounded imho).

Here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963399

Which comment is trying to downplay the issue? What is the issue?

@nickray, with ssh, I manage the root of thrust. With Webauthn, someone else manages it for me, be it Yubico or Intel or Apple.

This is a fundamental difference.

As Stavros mentions, you can, and if you feel qualified, you should manage your own keys. Be that with some software authenticator you deem safe or write yourself, or with e.g. our keys that are open source, so you can modify anything to your liking, etc. etc.

I sense a bit of 90s security thinking from your arguments though, where every end user and mid-level admin handles security decisions they're frankly not qualified for.

This is what I meant by "safe defaults". Yes some people use e.g. password managers, but no, most people don't. Yes, some people manage to use GPG to manage their ssh keys, but no most people, even qualified, don't/can't/won't.

"Bad defaults with patches hopefully making it safe" is just not the way we should be heading.

I agree with all of your points, I'd just like to point out that, even if everyone ends up using software authenticators (password manager-style) with WebAuthn, we'll still be in a much better position than we are today, where people just use the same insecure password everywhere.

>every end user and mid-level admin handles >security decisions they're frankly not >qualified for.

It's better for the society to let them make their share of mistakes. In the longer term, everyone will be safer and, incidentially, more intelligent.

You're wrong. You can manage your own keys. You don't need any big corporation for WebAuthn.

Well, that's assuming that the anti-feature of device attestation doesn't end up being used in the inevitable way that the spec allows:

"But attestation is not spoofable. Therefore, if sites launch webauthn support and accept attestations from the current set of token vendors, future vendors may be locked out of the market: Their devices won’t work because their attestations aren’t trusted, and they won’t be able to get sites to update because they won’t have enough market presence to matter."

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2018/03/27/webauthn.html

I think the whole attestation thing is generally a terrible idea. It's not impossible to extract data from secure hardware, right now there is not a lot of incentive to do it because it's not going to get you much, spend a month of hardware research to get one user's key, no thanks. But with whole batches of devices having the same private attestation key stored on the device this incentives essentially ransom of security key vendors. I.e. Lets say I am a hacker that spends a month of hardware research finding a vulnerability and extracting the attestation private from a token. Its worth my time because I know this vendor has 100,000+ keys out there that uses this same attestation key. I then request that vendor send me $500,000 in bitcoin or I release the private publicly. The vendor pays the ransom because it's cheaper than recalling 100,000+ security keys. Another issue here is it's not if but when this happens, so when it does how do all of the web sites out there update to block the hacked keys? Lots of web sites never will. Time to rethink the attestation key being stored each token, that's a bad idea.

Yes, if a service says "we only support Yubikeys for login", you should boycott them.

I hope that principle does establish itself among users of the web, but I suspect that if a bank says "You have to use one of these supported devices to access your account online" people are not going to change their bank because of it.

Similarly, if China mandates a government-approved (backdoored?) device when accessing Chinese websites, I don't suppose Chinese citizens are going to boycott those. Other countries might reasonably retaliate by forbidding sites to accept authentication by devices made in China.

Do you think that if Apple decreed that you can only securely log in to Apple websites with an iPhone (or some other device made by Apple) people would switch to Android? It's hard enough to get people to boycott Facebook despite repeated scandals that are much worse than having a whitelist of supported authentication devices.

If those organizations wanted to do what you say, and WebAuthn didn't support attestation, I doubt they'd say "well I guess we just can't do that" and give up, though.

Right now they can't (cheaply) say "You must own a device from this specific list in order to use our website" because there is no way of cryptographically proving that. What WebAuthn has done, by including support for attestation, is make that not only possible but likely, presenting it as something beneficial for security and making it easy to implement.

It is rational to not give your adversaries the tools needed to oppress you.

I don't agree. My bank issues its own hardware tokens that I must use, China mandates the use of its equipment and Apple does the same. If someone wants to mandate the use of a specific device, they can just do that. The fact that a similar standard exists doesn't mean much.

If my bank wanted to mandate the use of Yubikeys, it would do that, WebAuthn or no. It would sell me the Yubikey, as it now sells me its RSA token. I don't think the protocol the token speaks matters.

You started by saying that if a service required a specific type of hardware to use it then we should boycott it, but now you're saying it happens all the time and you're fine with it.

I accept your point about the protocol being irrelevant, however. One could even say that, if services are going to require specific pieces of hardware, it makes sense that the requirements are communicated and enforced using an open standard protocol, as that does allow a certain degree of interoperability and Free Software implementation.

The counter-argument, though, is that currently there are barriers to sites implementing such policies (due to the cost of issuing these devices and linking them to a specific account/address). If we set the precedent that every site should be using this technology, and reduce the cost of doing so, we bring about a set of dynamics where individual sites can start to introduce incompatibilities, whether with good intentions, or for anti-competitive reasons, or by accident.

Maybe this won't lead to people needing to carry around five dongles and two phones with them, but it could easily lead to having a lot of power concentrated into the hands of a small number of entities, or even just a single one, like the bad old days of "This site works best in Internet Explorer". Moreover, this is not just a theoretical concern, as it has already started to happen, as the link above explained:

"FIDO does not dismiss these worries and their answer, for the moment, is the metadata service (MDS). Essentially this is a unified root store that all sites checking attestation are supposed to use and update from."

The only service I have seen that only allows Yubikeys so far is Vanguard.