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
I have used a Yubikey for years. Nothing is perfect, but as you mentioned, the only hacks of them have been with persistent physical access, or somehow getting the end user to hit the activate button tens of thousands of times.

On any system, if you give an attacker physical access to the device, you are done. Just assume that. If your Yubikey lives in your wallet, or on your key chain, and you only activate it when you need it, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to crack it.

As far as physical device access, my last employer maintained a 'garage' of laptops and phones for employees traveling to about a half dozen countries. If you were going there, you left your corporate laptop and phone in the US, and borrowed one of these 'travel' devices with you for your trip. Back home, those devices were never allowed to connect to the corporate network. When you handed them in, they were wiped and inspected, but IT assumed that they were still compromised.

Lastly, Yubikey, as a second factor, is supposed to be part of a layered defense. Basically forcing the attacker to hack both you password and your Yubikey.

It bugs me that people don't understand how important two factor auth is, and also how crazy weak SMS access codes are.