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
> 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.

But what does this have to do with the FIDO authenticator?

At first I thought you said $100 per user, and I figured, wow, you are buying them all two Yubikeys, that's very generous. And then I realised you wrote "per month".

None of this costs anything "per month per user". You're buying some third party service, they charge whatever they like, this is the same as the argument when people said we can't have HTTPS Everywhere because my SSL certificate cost $100. No, you paid $100 for it, but it costs almost nothing.

I built WebAuthn enrollment and authentication for a vanity site to learn how it works. No problem, no $100 per month per user fees, just phishing proof authentication in one step, nice.

The integration doesn't get any better than this. I guess having watched a video today of people literally wrapping up stacks of cash to Fedex their money to scammers I shouldn't underestimate how dumb people can be but really even if you struggle with TOTP do not worry, WebAuthn is easier than that as a user.