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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

I don't see that as a flaw really. It's not different to having a password manager, with proper WebAuthn atleast.

What you do is you take this key that unlocks the kingdom.

And then you keep it safe.

Unlike before there isn't 20 keys that unlock parts of the kingdom that might lead to unlocking other kingdoms via roundabout ways. Your attention for security can be focused on a single key.

The average users will be much safer if we force them to only have to remember one single password that can be securely used for everything without the usual drawbacks (that's why security people recommend password managers)

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The flaw stems from the fact that an attacker can thru social engineeung acquire that root crendential (password or biometric or token). Once they have it, they can clean out all your banking, stock and home equity line accounts in one sweep. You as a user may not know that credential is compromised - maybe it was a key logger, maybe it was social engineering the cell phone provider to port your number and then qualify their phone with an sms token. You don’t know when that happened - you just see empty accounts.

With personal password managers, no third party is issuing tokens for access - just you. So it’s unlikley to be chosen for an attack - because it’s too hard for the attacker to acquire the credentials for access without detection.

Whether you use a hardware key, or a password manager, in both cases the attacker needs both authentication factors: your password, and the hardware key or password manager.

With a hardware key you gain the advantage of the attackers having to physically gain access to that key.

This is the misunderstanding attackers can exploit. Credentials need to be reissued because people lose them ocassionally. So that process now becomes a pathway for exploits.

No - that process _remains_ a pathway for exploits against the particular website being targeted. The process does not open new pathways for transferring exploits from one site to another - on the contrary, such exploits are made more difficult by the separation of credentials.

See my reply to your other comment and review CTAP in the spec.

Social Engineering is difficult problem with a solution quite simple; make the hardware resistant to replay attacks and don't give the user anything they can leak.

Password managers don't protect against this. People have given attackers their entire password vault, all you need is a convincing story about some security audit and you needing to review all their passwords. Users believe this.

The solution there is to take away the things a user can leak (passwords) and replace them with things that can only be stolen (tokens). We can train users to never give away their yubikey. Of course some will still fall for social engineering but for a yubikey/equivalent it's fully acceptable to say "never ever never give to anyone, no matter what they say".

I think you misunderstand how WebAuthn works - there's no "root credential". See my other reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17032637

No third party issues tokens in WebAuthn either - you have your one or a couple of authenticators you use everywhere, and those authenticators create their credential keypairs locally on the device (and a separate keypair is created for each site - they're not shared between sites).

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