zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey, and someone linked me to the Titan sidechannel where researchers demonstrated that, with persistent access, and a dozen hours of work, they could break the guarantees of a Titan chip[0]. They said "an attacker will just steal it". The researchers, on the other hand, stressed how very fundamentally difficult this was to pull off due to very limited attack surface.

This is the sort of absolutism that is so pointless.

At the same time, what's equally frustrating to me is defense without a threat model. "We'll randomize this value so it's harder to guess" without asking who's guessing, how often they can guess, how you'll randomize it, how you'll keep it a secret, etc. "Defense in depth" has become a nonsense term.

The use of memory unsafe languages for parsing untrusted input is just wild. I'm glad that I'm working in a time where I can build all of my parsers and attack surface in Rust and just think way, way less about this.

I'll also link this talk[1], for the millionth time. It's Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's TAO, talking about how to make NSA's TAO's job harder.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA

>>static+Di
> Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey

The problem is that the recent security company purchases suggest that it costs roughly $100 per month per user to have just basic security. Cost goes up from that exponentially.

Everybody defaults to a small number of security/identity providers because running the system is so stupidly painful. Hand a YubiKey to your CEO and their secretary. Make all access to corporate information require a YubiKey. They won't last a week.

We don't need better crypto. Crypto is good enough. What we need is better integration of crypto.

>>bsder+SS
> Hand a YubiKey to your CEO and their secretary.

Well, I'm the CEO lol so we have an advantage there.

> The problem is that the recent security company purchases suggest that it costs roughly $100 per month per user to have just basic security.

Totally, this is a huge issue to me. I strongly believe that we need to start getting TPMs and hardware tokens into everyone's hands, for free - public schools should be required to give it to students when they tell them to turn in homework via some website, government organizations/ anyone who's FEDRAMP should have it mandated, etc. It's far too expensive today, totally agreed.

edit: Wait, per month? No no.

> We don't need better crypto.

FWIW the kicker with yubikeys isn't really anything with regards to cryptography, it's the fact that you can't extract the seed and that the FIDO2 protocols are highly resistant to phishing.