Pioneers of web cryptography on the future of authentication
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Identity felt like hot idea back then ~2011, this concept of owning your own. There was another company that raised a lot of money that was working on it, Personal.com.
I was able to meet with Larry Drebes at the time who was involved early with OpenID, and at the time was growing Janrain which was helping big companies handle user federation.
That year, Chris Poole of 4Chan controversially said Facebook and Google had it wrong: "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you are a mirror, that there's one reflection that you have; one idea of self," Poole added. "What you see in that mirror is what everybody else sees. But in fact, we're more like diamonds: you can look at people from any angle and see something totally different." [0]
Anyhow, a decade has passed and it feels like very little has happened with identity, the ability to control identity away from centralized structures.
My advice to any of them would be that "identity" is not a product. Authentication and federation to specific systems, useful features (i.e. sharing photos of grandkids), these can be made into products.
[0] https://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/
> That year, Chris Poole of 4Chan controversially said Facebook and Google had it wrong: "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you are a mirror, that there's one reflection that you have; one idea of self,"
I don't know about that. I mean, in that year, Jericho Forum was past the formative stage and was already pushing 'personas'. Google's beyondcorp was based on Jericho Forum principles so, while it doesn't take personas into account, it does have a first-class concept of the trust tier. In my mind, these are related concepts.
But that's internal enterprise-facing.
Externally, consumer-facing as well, Chris Poole was wrong; Google actually did embrace the faceted diamond idea of identity. G+ was launched 6 months before Poole made that statement. G+' primary feature was circles, which are a similar persona/diamond/faceted idea of identity. Not from the authentication POV, of course, but definitely from the identity POV. We all know how well G+ did. Not completely, but a large part of the failure was that people are only good at being a mirror. Circles was a disaster.
> Anyhow, a decade has passed and it feels like very little has happened with identity, the ability to control identity away from centralized structures.
Are you referring to authentication, or identity? Managing multiple identity facets is too burdensome and provides too low utility to most people, and there are exposure risks. The folks that are able and want to manage multiple personas can easily manage it via multiple accounts, can they not? I'd be surprised if people on 4chan use the same username that they do on facebook, for example. They want to keep those completely 100% separate (from observable activity), and are able to do so just fine, thank you very much, within existing centralized structures. I am not sure how a decentralized structure would present an advantage and moreso, an advantage that matters.
A critically important part of the market is market timing. General Magic failed but it wasn't because their product sucked (which it did). It's because the market wasn't ready. But today, we see their legacy everywhere.
So the question is, is the market ready now in 2020? I personally don't think so, but I don't think looking back at 2011 bolsters the argument. The world is very different today. For one thing, you can raise money on a blockchain-based product, regardless of its usefulness. ;) Let's not forget, the point of VC is not to have a successful product, it's to have a successful exit. Your product advice may not be relevant.
However, anything that does not delight a user is a mistake to build for a startup.
"Reducing the risk" and "building trust" with users means nothing to users when there is no useful product. So instead of integrating this and trying to use this choice to market your product, you should be building a better product and marketing that.
Because this won't sell any product.
Only a fraction of a fraction of people care where data is stored.
So if you have VC capital you should not be spending your time integrating stuff like this you should be building something that people want to use.
Apple is able to play the long game on security and privacy cause they have the cash and market position to do so. It is also the right thing to do, but again they are in a special position to invest in these areas.
See also "choose boring technology" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23444594
Also, this is perhaps not directly related but more context for my parent comment, Larry Drebes' email in 2013 about shutting down Janrain's openID service: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6328182
Otherwise, your options are a separate yubikey-like token that you buy and "personalize," with new keys and linking identity attributes to it, or some weak variation of obfuscated code to store and process your root of trust key.
Business wise, the threat model has a catastrophic failure mode, where a compromise likely exposes all users simultaneously, which becomes both worse and more likely as you scale. Then there are the use cases for strong identity proofing and authentication, where they all reduce to some powerful party wanting someone else to adopt sufficiently strong identity to use as recourse against them. Strong identity is for institutions to manage populations interchangeably, and nobody signs up for that, it's regulated down onto them.
The conceptual test I use is, if it interferes with your ability to consume drugs or pornography, it's not a viable consumer product.
Strong identity proofing without commensurately strong anonymity fails that heuristic. Self sovereign identity is only viable if it's either anonymous and disposable, or enforced downwards by a de-facto monopoly.
When I looked at the related startup company's site, I thought, "clearly the VC investment triad decision was based on 'team+market', with 'product' to be figured out later." I'm definitely not smarter than anyone involved there, but the product hurdles in front of them are expensive, political, and complex.
Is it possible that I FHE-wrap my own private key, send it to you, and you can sign with my key without the plain text? that sounds crazy? Am I missing something?
Instead of using WBC, in this hypothetical case FHE becomes the scheme for performing a verification step without yielding information about the key to an attacker with root on the device. It's another handwavey blackbox, but it's a such a change in how we do security protocols that it's worth mentioning as plausibly having consequences for authN. It's a hard problem that gets addressed in areas like authenticated encryption, direct anonymous attestation, and other more use case specific protocols. Someone working in the field today would have more insight into it.
Security and authN protocols are really just about using crypto to diffuse and distribute risk, so it's conceivable there are use cases where FHE facilitates shifting risk for key security onto the end user, like payment cards, etc.
The value here being that I can make my own secret key, and via FHE send the server a "cloaked" key that they will get the right answer without knowing my secret.
So apart from the initial key sharing, it's down to me to keep the key safe (as you say, pushing risk into the consumer like debit cards)
Feels like it where FIDO goes next.
These "burner phone"-keys are perhaps preferable to many people.
> you can't have an endogenous hardware root of trust on each device
You mean practically transferable? Sadly, a lot of security applications currently link their functionality to specific phone hardware. I think the whole approach to declare your device compromised just doesn't really fit practical applications but has become a pretty common axiom, although I understand the pessimism if we look at OS for mobile devices. Why would I believe trusted computing hardware and not the software in times we change both frequently? Doesn't really ring a bell for me. And beyond that I don't like to be treated as a terrorist by my own machine.
I fully agree that an identity should be at least disposable and certainly as anonymous as it can be. This are the core requirements I would level at a solution.
>>> Jermoluk: Full sovereign identity. You should be in charge of your own identity.
Yes. I mean this seems so obvious but it is refreshing to see someone, anyone, say it.
Even I have a plan for a gravataar-like service for client certificates, so it's not like this is hard stuff.
If your trust is confined to a few dozen co-conspirators it all works fine.
But when you try scale up it breaks badly because human trust is not actually transitive.
PGP tries to fix that by asking you about two things, in the process further worsening the UX. PGP asks Alice if she believes this key is Bob, and then also if she trusts Bob to decide who other people are for her.
Very quickly Alice will discover that unless she agrees to allow multiple such transitive trust steps the "Web of trust" doesn't do much for her. Hopefully she gives up at this point.
But if she keeps using it, then eventually the other shoe drops. Alice sends a message to "Frank" which she intends to keep secret. But unfortunately it doesn't actually go to Frank, the "Frank" identity was vouched for by Edgar. Alice trusted Bob, who trusted Carol, and Carol trusted Dana, and unfortunately Dana is a poor judge of character and trusted Edgar who isn't very reliable.
Is this like saying human trust cannot be 100% delegated?
If so, that seems to be the model of the third party CA system. As a user I really have little say in "who", e.g., the web browser, should trust. I have (unintentionally) delegated trust to third parties. They decide who I should trust. As a user, I am not supposed to care about or understand this process. This really does not sound like "authentication" to me because I have not authenticated anything. Everything is being handled by third parties.
In choosing to engage in conversation with Dana, or even Edgar, you are not obliged to accept their word as to the identity of Frank, that's always Trent's job. And so Edgar's unreliability and Dana's poor character judgement aren't a problem.
Spectrum: Where do we go next? What is authentication going to look like in 10 years?
Jermoluk: Full sovereign identity. You should be in charge of your own identity. It is yours after all.
- This needs a mobile app, which stores identity information.
- A website shows it's QR code for registration.
- Users scans the QR code with the mobile app, and checks which information is requested and Approves or Deny.
- When pressing Approve, the identity is sent to the website, which use it for registering the user.
- User should be able to fully control logins from the app, e.g. show a list on logged in websites, force logout.
So it's more or less glorified autofill? It should at most give the site a token. Imagine how signing in with Apple, Facebook, or Google works right now but instead of having your identity with those 3, you have it in that app (or somewhere) and it's all your own. Which means you have to replicate on the user side some of the functionality that they offer and package it in a "fit for a user" format. I mean in the end you're holding on to your whole online identity so extra caution is needed.
When users have completely sovereign identity they’ll also need some way to share it. I could see Handshake being the solution here (keybase was another viable alternative but they sold to zoom...)
> We figured out how to make a personal certificate authority on your own computer,
This isn't entirely true. I can make a self-signed cert, but there's no root of trust exdcept my computer: someone else can make their own self-signed cert claiming to be me.
I recently bought an SMIME cert from Sectigo for $20. There needs to be a personal CA and commensurate tooling, but it is still not widely available for non-miliatry.
Is there a way for me to get a personal cert that can be authenticated with a CA? Because I've been looking for some time. MozillaZine has a page on SMIME certs, but 80% of the names are crossed off.[1]
> muse of cryptography
Definitely Melpomone. ;)
[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs:_Get_an_SMIME_c...
Assume you created a self-signed personal certificate and you use that to sign your emails.
What if I make a self-signed cert claiming to be you, and create an email address nmelo@gmail.com.
How would someone know which one to trust if there wasn't a third party to verify youre the real nmelo? Websites do this with trusted CA roots on their browsers.
Going back further, business do it with services like Dun & Bradstreet.
But personal?
What am I missing?
Now extend that to a personal certificate authority. As long as the server is able to trust that the Root Certificate, and any Intermediates certs in that CA are controlled by the user, they should be able to trust certificates signed by that CA to authenticate that person.
> the fact that a person controls the private key associated with the certificate should be enough
Going back to my example, of you and I both claiming to be the same person with our certificates, us both having a private key doesn't solve this problem. Who authenticates who is the real person? Or is that not the point of certificates?
> if they have enough confidence that the private key is being securely stored by the user
Or... is it that a self-signed cert just proves who owns the private key, and I'm putting to much into what a cert is supposed to be?
> and any Intermediates certs in that CA are controlled by the user,
ah, ok, so I can act as my own CA because I have the private key for the root of trust.
That about says it all.
Why does every app have to use the same key management system?
What’s the problem with identity, exactly?
I already own my identity on every app I use. I know the password (or my password manager does).
Take HN for example. There’s no significant difference between HN asking for a password on a form, and asking a browser API for a certificate. Except the latter is more complex and prone to error.
It's not clear whether the "one identity" system is meant to prevent or empower that. Looking at beyondcorp I'd guess it's meant to prevent.
( And if they fail at this, why would I trust them with anything else? )
Shame!
if it were someone ordinary, i would write it off as another poorly conceived and poorly run wannabe startup. but given the people involved, instead i find it puzzling.
I could see Martin Hellman being relevant, maybe. But there's no real substance in this piece, certainly not from Jermoluk. What I got out of it is that PKI is the answer. As I think DNS-based PKI is the answer, I think he's not too far, but he's probably selling something I don't need or want.
- registries and registrars run name-constrained CAs
- DNSSEC/DANE (RFC 6698 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6698)Or put another way, a puff piece.
This looks basically like a paid for article you'd see in NY Times Bits section. What's odd about it is that it's on IEEE's site. I don't look at that often, but I suppose I'd hope it wouldn't be sort of shilling startups.