"YubiKey Survives Ten Weeks in a Washing Machine"
I think you'll be safe! :)
https://www.yubico.com/press-releases/yubikey-survives-ten-w...
I've had a Yubi Key for almost 5 years now. Zero issues.
These were the larger ones. Not sure how the smaller "nano" ones would perform.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/udzx1c/ledger...
That is arguably less secure in some contexts, but there are workarounds, and I do see the point that for most services, availability/key loss recovery is as much of a concern as is security.
It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than TOTP.
While not ideal, I'd be happy if I could register with the public key of my offsite key or something similar. Really I think there should be a way to register a public persona, and add / remove keys from that persona at will.
Or, just let me (somehow) generate multiple hardware devices with a shared seed.
Now your one time backup covers all current and future services.
Are there things that support this that aren't cryptocurrency wallets?
Also, BIP39, the only backup spec that exists for FIDO atm, originated in the Bitcoin community where key loss is a very expensive problem that needed an elegant solution.
BIP39 can be used to backup any type of asymmetric cryptographic key that could ever exist in a human friendly way but sadly I am not aware of any vendors implementing it outside of hardware wallets which are general purpose tools
They can be used for PGP and FIDO and password management without using them for cryptocurrency and this is totally valid.
But here's the problem: outside of the hype bubbles, cryptocurrency stuff does not have a good reputation. If the only thing that supports this markets itself as a cryptocurrency wallet, that is going to hurt adoption. People generally do not buy devices in which they actively do not want the main feature.
(I did remind myself of DiceKeys[2] while looking through my notes to find [1], but that has its own problems, such as "oh god what are you doing why does this involve OCRing a photograph of dice on my phone".)
[1] https://github.com/solokeys/solo1/blob/4.1.5/fido2/ctaphid.c...
To your dicekeys example, a much better solution, IMO is using bip39-diceware which allows you to roll for 256 bits of entropy in the form of 24 BIP39 words with dice, using only a paper worksheet. You can use these with a KDF to determinstically generate any type of key material be it for PGP, FIDO2, mutual TLS, or whatever you like.
BIP39 is a general purpose innovation in human friendly cryptography, and so are the general purpose personal HSM devices that support it.
I don't feel it is productive to balk at a generally useful technology just because one dislikes the biggest audience creating demand for it.
Someone can have a religious objection to porn and still enjoy the bandwidth growth and other improvements to the internet that porn demand helped create.
Just because a toaster is marketed for toast, does not mean you can't enjoy it for pop tarts. Just because a pressure cooker has a "chicken" button, dosen't make it any less useful to a vegan.
The examples are endless.
Those that are fundamentally against experiments in decentalizated governance should at least try to appreciate that space presents high stakes security problems that engineers will innovate to solve.
Many of the best cryptographers in the world, like Dan Boneh and team at Stanford, spend a huge amount of their time focusing on innovations in privacy, computational effenciency, and cryptography to meet demand created by popular decentralized systems experiments.
If anything, buy products like hardware wallets that improve security for you and recommend their teams spin up marketing and product development approaches more inclusive of customers that have moral objections to decentralized governance and value storage use cases like yourself.
But beside that, perhaps I didn't quite make the point of my comment clear enough. You're trying really hard to convince me of things. I know very well how this works, and what problems it solves, and I do think it's a good solution to this problem.
The main reason I'm not going to buy one of these isn't anything about the technology; it's because I already have a solution for myself and I have no reason to bother switching to another solution.
This isn't about my opinions. I'm explaining why the general public is going to continue to ignore this otherwise valid solution. The marketing around it actively ties it to a thing that most people have negative opinions of, and makes the feature they actually want seem like an afterthought. Even here, you repeatedly refer to it as a hardware wallet, because that has always been the primary focus of those devices.
The effect of this is that the average non-blockchain-person just sees you posting a lot of comments in a tangentially related thread trying to sell them on blockchain tech. Do you see why this, from the perspective of a non-blockchain-person, is counterproductive?
You will continue to have trouble getting people to adopt these devices until either the marketing focus changes or public opinion on blockchains changes. And one of those is going to be much easier to accomplish than the other.
I am not telling you this to bash blockchains. I do have negative opinions on that space, but I don't care to debate them here; nothing would be accomplished by either of us by doing so. I am giving you advice on the way your message is perceived by others.
"Relying Parties SHOULD allow and encourage users to register multiple credentials to the same account. Relying Parties SHOULD make use of the excludeCredentials and user.id options to ensure that these different credentials are bound to different authenticators."
One of the implications here being that you have zero available authenticators if your main authenticator breaks.
they do know about it (I had a friend who was a PM there), but it's low priority...
My yubikey is getting to about 10 years old, and I have replacements for it but find it very difficult to switch. It will eventually fail as an things do and it will be problematic.
The problem is that I have several dozen accounts connected to it and I don't know all of them. So either I'm carrying and trying multiple keys at all times or not getting into a site that haven't been rotated yet.
Multiple keys on an all sites is also basically impossible. You need to register all the keys, and ideally those keys are in different places.
Moving the GPG key is easy - though I might try using the FIDO2 support in SSH instead. However for every TOTP and U2F key I’m going to have to re-enroll the new keys… It feels like there should be a better way.
Please contact me if you're interested, I will release the tooling I have.
I have not thought about the various attack vectors that this may or may not enable though.
[0] https://github.blog/2021-11-15-highlights-from-git-2-34/#tid... [1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...
I don't want to spend a bunch of time when I visit to find that key and add it to all of my new accounts and hope I got everything - I want to make a backup of my current key right before I visit and when I visit, I just put the new backup key in the desk drawer and take the old one home with me.
All of the accounts require username / passowrd and the Yubikey. I'm not willing to not have a password.
I have much more backups of my workstation etc., should I now buy dozens of crypto hardware key thingies and constantly switch them around to match the backup disks?
For those who do offsite backups: Is an offsite backup possible across the Internet? Or do you have to physically drive the key to the offsite location?
When I create a new account somewhere, does that mean I have to move N backup keys out of their drawer to the workstation and register each of them on the account?
And how to even create a backup and keep it in sync?
With backup disks, it is a matter of shutting down the machine, removing one disk from the RAID1, and you have a backup (the removed disk is the backup). Or doing "dd if=..." if you don't use raid.
Is something as simple possible with those fancy crypto toys? Or is some arcane magic required to copy them?
Is this perhaps all as usual: An attempt to get more control and tracking of users, disguised as "security"?
Backup once, setup 100 accounts, lose authentication device, restore backup to new device, regain access to all 100 accounts. Easy.
I have a Yubikey and use it as a part of my passwords. But I would like to have a second master password that I only use in emergencies. Yes, it is easy to forget so make sure you don't. But a password that is rarely used is also rarely exposed to third parties.
To be honest, the most problems I see with FIDO is the lacking trust in the alliance of companies behind it but I don't know too much about the technicalities of FIDO.
In all cases the Yubikeys still worked even as bare abused PCBs. You need a blowtorch or a drill to break one.