Hacker News Reader

Comment by tanderson92 | Hacker News Reader

But you already succeeded at sacrificing security, because there is no note about performing key generation not in an internet-connected machine, ideally a live cd / usb image boot.

From the drduh guide:

> It is recommended to generate cryptographic keys and configure YubiKey from a secure operating system and using an ephemeral environment

View on HN

To the best of my knowledge, if you trust the YubiKey firmware, and assuming that it behaves correctly, the private keys are generated on the YubiKey itself, and cannot be exported.

This is assuming the binary you are running on your internet-connected computer is doing what you expect.

The GPG applet is inside the YubiKey and running entirely on there, to the best of my knowledge.

Update: new YKs with new firmware are apparently able to provide proofs that the keys were generated on hardware.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21523354

Oh that's great, alleviates my concerns, which was like, how do you know you're even asking the yubikey to do key generation rather than a malicious actor generating a private key and placing it on the yubikey. Thanks!

If you don't trust the hardware, then don't use it. I'm not sure what solution would fit your threat model, other than building your own.

I didn't say I distrusted the hardware, I said the very opposite. I said I didn't see how, before this attestation feature, you could guarantee your computer software even asked the hardware to generate the key.

Which means you have no backup...

Well, you have no backup for your brain either, yet here we are.

It's trivial to make backup YubiKeys. Just takes another 5m, and storing it in a secure place. I'll make a note in our README that we do do this.

"Trust" isn't really that binary. I trust smart cards and key fobs much more with not leaking key material than generating said keys in a safe fashion.

That specific best practice might not be the most important for most people to follow, compared to other things on the list, but it is definitively a good idea and has saved me before. Random number generators on embedded devices aren't always the best.

Yes but do mind hardware bugs that affected YubiKeys such as https://magicofsecurity.com/roca-critical-vulnerability-in-i...

Also I'd strongly encourage generating encryption subkey in software (offline, air-gapped machine) and then copying it to Yubikeys. If you lose your Yubikey (or mistype 3 times the PIN) you wouldn't be able to decrypt your secret data.

We're aware of hardware vulns like ROCA (we used to check the exact version of the YK, now we support only the major version 5).

We're taking the risk anyway because the benefits of having the private keys generated and stored entirely on the YK is entirely worth it.

We're also not primarily using the YK to encrypt messages. If continuing to decrypt shared messages in the future is critical, I'd personally look into HSMs which offers key-wrapped backup.

Do you know a HSM that use key wrapping and are OpenPGP compatible? I've seen only X.509 compatible ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com