So their vision of the future is that to do anything online, one MUST have a phone (ahem, portable wiretap)? And they're going to be keeping my secrets for me, for my own good?
I'm not sure I'm down with any of that.
I'm not sure I'm down with any of that.
It's very hard to make a privacy case against FIDO. Practically speaking it's one of the best things that happened to privacy&security since the invention of asymmetric cryptography. The deployment of this tech reduces phishing effectiveness to near zero, or in many cases literally zero.
With username and password, I have full control over my privacy in a very easy to understand fashion: If I randomly generate them I know I cannot be tracked (as long as I ensure my browser doesn't allow it by other means).
With those keys I have a opaque piece of hardware which transfers an opaque set of data to each website I use and I have NO idea what data that is because I do not manually type it in. I need to trust the hardware.
Sure, I could read the standard, but it very likely is complex enough that it is impossible to understand and trust for someone who has no crypto background.
And I also have no guarantee that the hardware obeys the standard. It might violate it in a way which makes tracking possible. Which is rather likely, because why else would big tech companies push this if it didn't benefit them in some way?
They switched to this internally a long time ago which basically eliminated phishing attacks against employees. There are security teams inside those megacorps that have a general objective of reducing the number of account takeovers, and non trivial resources to accomplish that. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Also, I am sure you will be able to stick to just passwords for a pretty long time while the world moves on to cryptographic authentication. I'm not being sarcastic here.
Said security teams have at most zero incentive that the privacy of the policy subjects is preserved.
The same corporations that routinely intercept all network traffic.
With your password manager, you're trusting a lot more: the software of the OS and kernel, the software of the browser and its dependencies, the software of your password generator and your password storage. You also have to hope the developers and administrators of the website you're signing in to aren't storing your passwords in plain text (and I don't just mean in the database - overly-aggressive APM/logging might be storing POST request data in a log stream somewhere).
The only attack that's an issue for both passwords and security key-based sign-in is targeted attacks against a website, where they use your browser to execute malicious API calls to the website after you've signed in regularly.
So I'm all up for considering different approaches.
FIDO is unrelated; it works by having the browser/device itself sync the virtual security keys[0], much in the same way they sync passwords currently. That's the only thing changing here, giving people the choice (and encouraging them) to sign in via "what you have" instead of "what you know".
If push comes to shove, I'm sure someone will develop a lightweight Android emulation layer you can run in the cloud that pretends to be a phone enough that you can use it.
The root of trust for which extends to who knows where, and you're not allowed to look at the source code or learn how it works because that would threaten Hollywood's profit margins.
We're basically building a system of DRM for access to human beings, and making the whole world dependent on these unaccountable entities.
Technologies like Intel's management engine and SGX or their AMD/Qualcom/Apple counterparts are definitely problematic for user freedom in the way they're implemented. However, the TPM system itself is quite neutral: usually, you can clear it from the UEFI, lock it with a password (though that might need to be done from the OS) leaving whatever hostile OS you may run unable to exert any control on the device whatsoever.
I'm personally a big fan of technologies like TPMs and secure boot as long as they're user configurable. I want to be able to install my own keys and force the system to only boot operating systems of my choice. Secure boot with just the MS keys is quite silly and ever since that one version of Grub could be exploited it's basically useless; secure boot with user or enterprise keys can be an incredible tool for defence in depth, for example when visiting countries where border agents may try to gain access to your data without your permission or knowledge (China, USA, etc.).
If I had my way, I'd use Coreboot together with Secure Boot, with encryption keys stored in a TPM, the transfer of which goes through an encrypted channel (a feature of TPM 2.0 that nobody uses) after unlocking it with a password. Sadly, most Linux OS developers have a grudge against these technologies because they're used by companies such as Microsoft and Apple to reduce user freedom on some of their devices.
this isn't true: there's a hash blacklist which is (supposed) to be regularly updated by your OS update mechanism
windows update does it anyway
official list is here: https://uefi.org/revocationlistfile
(I have my own root configured for all of my machines so only stuff I've signed can boot)
If it weren't for that small detail then I would agree that TPMs can be useful for secure key storage and the like, working for the device's owner and not against them. The actually useful (to the owner) parts of the TPM do not require the manufacturer's signature.
program generates random bytes->ask tpm to sign it->on signature return, program asks TPM for its public key->program verifies public key matches that of the signature->verify the public key is cross-signed by the manufacturer's certificate authority. The only attack here would be if Intel or AMD's PKI is compromised, which would certainly be leveraged against enterprise customers before any consumer customers got hit.
The issue could be addressed without removing the ability to attest as to the TPM's origin by including a protocol for the owner to dump the device's private encryption keys (e.g. by shorting one of the external pins to ground). The fixed attestation key set by the manufacturer would need to be restricted so that it can only be used to sign attestation messages, with all other keys being generated on the device so that they can be reset when the device changes owners.
Mass surveillance. You can just say mass surveillance.
> moving the trust boundary away from the control of the user entirely. I also don't enjoy it, but it would solve a lot of current problems we see in information security.
Every despot throughout history has noted that freedom can be traded for security, but I thought that most of us would agree that freedom is more important.