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Still reading the comments, but is anyone actually saying passwords are more secure in general? I think most people are saying that they get locked out of their account if they lose the token. How do you validate your account is your account if the only secret you have is lost? If you 100% require a hardware token, you need at least two and/or a method to auth that is not a hardware token so you can recover in a mode where you lost one.

But on the security note. There are several types of security. Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet.

Without any malware, I could pickup my friends keys and log into their account on my computer in seconds and without their knowledge. This is harder to do with a password. At the same time a password is much easier for someone who doesn't even know who I am to attack.

It's why 2FA is so necessary, it helps defend against both methods of attack.

"Security from the people directly around you and security from everyone on the internet." Are the people around you not on the internet? They are just a subset of that larger group, aren't they? Sorry if I'm not understanding your point there.

And like I said in my edit, I really hope that Yubikey is not the one and only one way to store private keys. I personally would be perfectly happy, for most websites and apps, to manage keys just like I do for ssh. On my hard drive, backed up to another hard drive or two of mine, protected by a passphrase. I imagine most people would be pretty comfortable letting a service like lastpass manage most of their private keys for them, with multiple copies synced between devices and encrypted with a strong passphrase.

The people around you are (probably) on the internet, but let me try to articulate the threats differently.

If I'm worried about 'people on the internet' that's threats like brute forcing my weak password, or determining my password on one site (through phishing, password leaks, whatever) and trying it everywhere else and finding I reused it; potentially using malware to slurp up passwords.txt from the desktop where I keep my varied passwords. If I keep a strong password for each site in a journal near my computer, I'm fairly well protected from internet threats as long as I don't get a keylogger. If I make sure I keep a copy of my passport journal somewhere else too, I won't lose access.

If I'm worried about people next to me, say roommates, office mates, or any one else who is near my computer, I'm more concerned about the physical security of my password journal; it might not be a good idea to keep it next to the computer if untrusted people will be there. These people could also be looking through password leaks, but they probably aren't.

Right. So to summarize, with passwords you worry about people near you and everyone on the internet, and with keys you only worry about people near you.

This is a huge improvement!

It’s why I told my parents to pick random passwords and write them all down in a notebook that they keep next to their computer. My way, they’re only stealable by their housekeeper or a burglar. If they needed to remember the passwords, they’d be vulnerable to 100 million script kiddies with rainbow tables.

Right. Public key cryptography essentially automates this process that you just described, and makes the security even stronger (because your random "password", AKA private key, stays with you and you only ever share the public key).

As a security person, would I be happier if everyone switched from password+email to FIDO+email? Certainly.

But FIDO has more competition than that. Since it's not backwards compatible with most existing systems, we have to choose which new protocols to support: passwordless, ssh-like keys, certificates, SQRL, etc. There's limited trust and resources to go around.

When my password is leaked, I can still access my $important_stuff. When I lose a hardware dongle, I potentially just lost irreplaceable data.

> I got an email from Twitter just a few days ago stating that they'd leaked my password

Clearly you didn't read the email.

The password was potentially logged to twitter's servers in plaintext.

They have no evidence anyone collected those passwords, but various employees could, in theory, have seen those logs.

Presumably those logs are now all deleted.

Even if you didn't reset your twitter password, it's very likely you'd be fine since it's not "leaked" (to the wider internet), but could have been seen by some employees who, for fear of being fired, no doubt did not save it (and in all likelyhood didn't see it in the first place).

You obviously are more trusting than I am. Also, my point was that if Twitter messed up, so has every other website. Do you trust them all as much as you trust the Twitter employees?

You don’t trust Twitter’s story but you trust Twitter software engineers more than others?

I trust Twitter’s story about the plain text logging but don’t trust their software engineers more than others.

Assume Breach - I read an article about Microsoft's strategy in this regards. Twitter seems to follow a similar model.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azuresecurity/2015/10/19/an...

I think his point still stands. You entrust your passwords to third parties. They don't always handle it correctly.

>I also really hope that hardware tokens like a yubikey are not required for every site or app. I'd like to be able to keep private keys on my phone or laptop for some things

Web Authentication supports this with what's called "platform authenticators" - some kind of TPM/secure enclave etc. built into the computer (most likely a laptop/phone), possibly integrated with a fingerprint scanner. The expectation is that sites will let you register more than one credential (like many (most?) do for U2F), so you can have a keyring device for initial logins on new computers (or for logging in on a friend's computer) and then use a platform credential on each for most daily use. Intel's built-in U2F thing is something to this effect, and might be compatible.

It's also theoretically possible that a phone could expose its platform authenticator to other computers via Bluetooth/NFC/USB, but that's still hypothetical at this point.

so basically to defend against password hacking they want to use FIDO/yubikeys.

Too bad if something like twitter happens your yubikey is probably useless after it would've prolly logged anything to their servers.

P.S.: it's possible to change passwords, but hardware keys need to be destroyed and changed. Also Yubikeys can also have bugs. https://www.yubico.com/2017/10/infineon-rsa-key-generation-i... So basically it's not more secure. even worse the more code you throw at a problem the more likely it is to be unsecure.

Um, if we use public key cryptography, the only thing websites can log or leak is your public key. Since it's public, that doesn't break anything.

accept that your public key is useless if twitter accidently logs challenges. or even worse your hardware is useless if key generation is too weak. or even more worse the protocol is so complex that chances are high that even implementations can contain bugs. or ...

most engineers have trouble implementing simple logins with password. do you really think that having a complex system will be better?

>your public key is useless if twitter accidently logs challenges

No, this is also incorrect. That's not how public key cryptography works.

>your hardware is useless if key generation is too weak

This is true, which is why you choose an authenticator vendor that's widely trusted to make high quality hardware. If you don't trust Yubico, there are competitors.

>the protocol is so complex that chances are high that even implementations can contain bugs

This is only partly true - most of the complexity is in the browser and authenticator layers, and are implemented by cryptography experts in the browser teams and authenticator manufacturers. Almost all of the server layer complexity can be encapsulated in reusable open source libraries - app developers will only have to implement their business logic on top of it, just like they have to do for password authentication too.

>do you really think that having a complex system will be better?

It will eliminate the problems with phishing and password reuse. That is definitely better in my book.

Why would Twitter logging the challenges make the key useless? That data has no value and can't be replayed in a future login attack.

This isn't a hypothetical discussion. Asymmetric encryption has been battle-tested for decades now. If it's as weak as you say, SSH and GPG would have gotten blown open long ago rather than being the the thing we all reach for when we wanted an actually unbreakable system.

>Too bad if something like twitter happens your yubikey is probably useless after it would've prolly logged anything to their servers.

Like krupan also points out, this is flat out incorrect. The FIDO2 protocols are designed so that such a failure case is not possible, for two reasons. First, no secrets are shared - the server only sees _public_ keys and signatures. Second, a different public key is generated for each website - there is no globally correlatable identity.