this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
83 points (90.3% liked)

Technology

34988 readers
103 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The hardware keys are great but so far don’t have enough storage. For example, Yubikey as a second factor dynamically generated its responses, but now that it’s storing them it’s very limited to at most 25. It’s a known issue that will be solved though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Fido2 solves this already ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Passkeys are FIDO2. The issue is the tokens don’t have much storage for them. For passwordless vs use as a second factor, it has to store it instead of dynamically generating a response to a challenge. They are two features of the protocol.

https://www.yubico.com/blog/a-yubico-faq-about-passkeys/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://developers.yubico.com/Passkeys/Passkey_concepts/Discoverable_vs_non-discoverable_credentials.html

While non-discoverable credentials are not considered passkeys, you should still be aware of them as there are still a number of valid scenarios where your application will need to support the use of them - especially as they are still valid WebAuthn credentials. These are credentials that cannot be generically invoked by a relying party. Instead a user will need to prompt the relying party with a username (user handle) to have the application provide a list of credential IDs to denote which credential(s) can be leveraged for authentication.

Fido2 webauthn non-discoverable credentials are completely unlimited. Because the private key is on the yubikey directly. The only downside of this, is you have to type in your username first, but I think that's an upside personally. I do not want anybody who compels disclosure of my hardware security key, to see all the accounts on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Are your non-discoverable credentials also locked on the key, or can someone who knows your handle and possesses your key access your accounts? Online usernames are not well protected, I’d rather my key lock out after a few failed attempts to access it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The non-discoverable keys cannot be removed from the device. The secret is non-transferable.

In the yubikey bio series, this is implemented as a second factor. So you log in, and then present your hardware key as a second factor. You need your fingerprint, the key, your username. Fairly secure.

I think this is a more secure model than pass keys as they're being promoted today

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, but do you need to unlock your key to use it? Possession is not enough to access discoverable credentials.

You edited, but I don’t see this as significantly more secure than the Passkeys, and most keys are not the bio series (not that I trust fingerprint readers anyway).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes you need to unlock the The hardware key

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In that case it does sound better, and many sites using passkeys still have you enter your username first anyway, at least at this point. I don’t know how Android implements it, I think iOS likely supports this use case and know that it also works as a second factor to a password through the same Passkey workflow. Unlike the Yubikey it always stores the key when you register though, even if it isn’t fully passwordless. Unfortunately what’s easy for the consumer will dominate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I think the argument and the article is users just are going to avoid this whole confusing mess

And I would absolutely like the ability to use hardware key to log into multiple accounts on the same service.