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Comment by throwaway52022 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway52022

I've resisted switching to a hardware key because I know that I'm going to break it, and that seems like a huge pain in the ass. I really want to be able to make a couple of backup keys, or maybe put another way, I want to be able to put the private key on the device myself, I don't necessarily care that the key is generated on the device and never leaves the device. I don't care if that slightly reduces my security - I'm not protecting nuclear weapons, my threat model is not state actors trying to attack me, my threat model is me leaving my key in my pants pocket before putting it in the washing machine.

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>my threat model is me leaving my key in my pants pocket before putting it in the washing machine.

"YubiKey Survives Ten Weeks in a Washing Machine"

I think you'll be safe! :)

https://www.yubico.com/press-releases/yubikey-survives-ten-w...

While I'm generally a fan of YubiKeys too, I've had one break without warning. Backups are highly recommended – you can lose them too, after all.

I wanted to enable YubiKey for my Bitwarden account and feared exactly this. Now I've spent 200€ for 4 YubiKeys, so if I ever miss or break one, I will hopefully be fine. But imagine telling your grandma to buy at least 2 YubiKeys for 100€ just to make your Facebook login more secure.

I was about to say the same thing. These things are quite sturdy and if you loose your key (as people do) you retire the old one and make a new. These things are neither expensive nor irreplaceable. Of course if you loose your key it's going to hurt, as it should.

I've had a Yubi Key for almost 5 years now. Zero issues.

Source: The people who sell YubiKeys.

You know what...I have a couple spares. I'll run the experiment myself :)

I've actually put my Yubikeys through worse. They've always survived :)

These were the larger ones. Not sure how the smaller "nano" ones would perform.

Has anyone tried a Ledger or Trezor device for something like this? Your FIDO U2F private key is deterministically generated [0] based upon your seed phrase, which you can backup, and restore on other devices.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/udzx1c/ledger...

At least Ledger actually does support U2F as an installable application, but that's the predecessor to FIDO and has some weaknesses in comparison. I'm also not sure whether WebAuthN supports legacy U2F authenticators without the browser performing some protocol translation.

Ledger and Trezor both support U2F, which is a FIDO protocol but not the latest version. The Trezor Model T additionally supports FIDO2 (WebAuthn).

I have a Ledger as a backup key. Keyword is backup since it's less convenient to use than a Yubikey due to needing to put in a pincode first. Though that could be a security feature in and of itself.

Any input which (Trezor/Ledger) is least likely to be a honeypot?, and/or a good device?

What do you mean by a honeypot? Both are pretty well trusted devices, and users easily have tens of billions of dollars deposited on them. Given that, I feel pretty comfortable using them for 2fa.

You just register 2-3 keys. It's not so bad.

Eh, retrieving a key from off-site storage every time you open a new account is a pretty big inconvenience, even for a security enthusiast.

That's exactly why FIDO [1] and WebAuthN [2] are moving towards a concept of backup-able/cross-device-sync-able authenticators.

That is arguably less secure in some contexts, but there are workarounds, and I do see the point that for most services, availability/key loss recovery is as much of a concern as is security.

[1] https://fidoalliance.org/multi-device-fido-credentials/

[2] https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1714

Right. Some core services get this treatment, like email and important online accounts. For others I rely on reset mechanisms tied to those email accounts if I lose the primary key and haven't had the chance to register the secondary. Every few months I'll sync up anything that has been missed.

It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than TOTP.

I realize FIDO is better than TOTP since it prevents phishing attacks, etc, but as a user, the ability to backup my seeds is extremely convenient.

You can backup FIDO with BIP39 on some devices like Ledger.

This. For a while I tried to keep a list of accounts I needed to add my offsite key to, and then every year or so I'd retrieve the key, and add in bulk, but that became way too complicated.

While not ideal, I'd be happy if I could register with the public key of my offsite key or something similar. Really I think there should be a way to register a public persona, and add / remove keys from that persona at will.

Or, just let me (somehow) generate multiple hardware devices with a shared seed.

You can generate duplicate FIDO devices with a shared seed right now. Hardware wallets like Ledger support this today.

You can use devices like Ledger that support BIP39 backup allowing you to create duplicate devices any time from a 24 word random seed.

Now your one time backup covers all current and future services.

You've recommended "devices like Ledger" many times in this thread.

Are there things that support this that aren't cryptocurrency wallets?

People have made the same incorrect assumption that fido can't be backed up many times and it is a common misconception that halts adoption of the best security win since TLS. I feel important to correct this in tech circles so we start telling friends and family to setup a solution to the most common account loss problems.

Also, BIP39, the only backup spec that exists for FIDO atm, originated in the Bitcoin community where key loss is a very expensive problem that needed an elegant solution.

BIP39 can be used to backup any type of asymmetric cryptographic key that could ever exist in a human friendly way but sadly I am not aware of any vendors implementing it outside of hardware wallets which are general purpose tools

They can be used for PGP and FIDO and password management without using them for cryptocurrency and this is totally valid.

I absolutely agree that this is a thing that needs to be solved. I cobbled together my own solution using undocumented bits of the Solo firmware[1], but that's not nearly usable enough for average users.

But here's the problem: outside of the hype bubbles, cryptocurrency stuff does not have a good reputation. If the only thing that supports this markets itself as a cryptocurrency wallet, that is going to hurt adoption. People generally do not buy devices in which they actively do not want the main feature.

(I did remind myself of DiceKeys[2] while looking through my notes to find [1], but that has its own problems, such as "oh god what are you doing why does this involve OCRing a photograph of dice on my phone".)

[1] https://github.com/solokeys/solo1/blob/4.1.5/fido2/ctaphid.c...

[2] https://dicekeys.com/

This problem is already well solved and deployed to millions of people. That it is my point.

To your dicekeys example, a much better solution, IMO is using bip39-diceware which allows you to roll for 256 bits of entropy in the form of 24 BIP39 words with dice, using only a paper worksheet. You can use these with a KDF to determinstically generate any type of key material be it for PGP, FIDO2, mutual TLS, or whatever you like.

BIP39 is a general purpose innovation in human friendly cryptography, and so are the general purpose personal HSM devices that support it.

I don't feel it is productive to balk at a generally useful technology just because one dislikes the biggest audience creating demand for it.

Someone can have a religious objection to porn and still enjoy the bandwidth growth and other improvements to the internet that porn demand helped create.

Just because a toaster is marketed for toast, does not mean you can't enjoy it for pop tarts. Just because a pressure cooker has a "chicken" button, dosen't make it any less useful to a vegan.

The examples are endless.

Those that are fundamentally against experiments in decentalizated governance should at least try to appreciate that space presents high stakes security problems that engineers will innovate to solve.

Many of the best cryptographers in the world, like Dan Boneh and team at Stanford, spend a huge amount of their time focusing on innovations in privacy, computational effenciency, and cryptography to meet demand created by popular decentralized systems experiments.

If anything, buy products like hardware wallets that improve security for you and recommend their teams spin up marketing and product development approaches more inclusive of customers that have moral objections to decentralized governance and value storage use cases like yourself.

Okay, so first of all, you know very well that "moral objections to decentralized governance" is not the problem people have with blockchain technology.

But beside that, perhaps I didn't quite make the point of my comment clear enough. You're trying really hard to convince me of things. I know very well how this works, and what problems it solves, and I do think it's a good solution to this problem.

The main reason I'm not going to buy one of these isn't anything about the technology; it's because I already have a solution for myself and I have no reason to bother switching to another solution.

This isn't about my opinions. I'm explaining why the general public is going to continue to ignore this otherwise valid solution. The marketing around it actively ties it to a thing that most people have negative opinions of, and makes the feature they actually want seem like an afterthought. Even here, you repeatedly refer to it as a hardware wallet, because that has always been the primary focus of those devices.

The effect of this is that the average non-blockchain-person just sees you posting a lot of comments in a tangentially related thread trying to sell them on blockchain tech. Do you see why this, from the perspective of a non-blockchain-person, is counterproductive?

You will continue to have trouble getting people to adopt these devices until either the marketing focus changes or public opinion on blockchains changes. And one of those is going to be much easier to accomplish than the other.

I am not telling you this to bash blockchains. I do have negative opinions on that space, but I don't care to debate them here; nothing would be accomplished by either of us by doing so. I am giving you advice on the way your message is perceived by others.

Would be neat if the devices had a public key you could keep onsite and use to enroll.

The services I interact with that support WebAuthn usually only allow you to register one key. Backup and recovery is a confusing puzzle for most of these services.

Tell the services you interact with that they're basically going against the spec.

"Relying Parties SHOULD allow and encourage users to register multiple credentials to the same account. Relying Parties SHOULD make use of the excludeCredentials and user.id options to ensure that these different credentials are bound to different authenticators."

Is it a SHOULD vs SHALL issue? Link to full spec?

It's SHOULD as per RFC2119, so basically you need to have a good reason with an understanding of the implications to ignore it.

One of the implications here being that you have zero available authenticators if your main authenticator breaks.

https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/

I haven't run into any like that, but I'm with you -- if I could only store one webauthn key, I wouldn't use it at all. Too risky.

I believe AWS root accounts don't support more than one key to be added.

They don't. And it's also not supported in the mobile app, which is a huge pain.

I don't think any AWS account allows more than one!

This has been talked about in HN comments almost daily for like a week — does anyone from AWS/Amazon read this forum, or are they too busy performing blood sacrifices trying to recruit graduates?

more like 2 years

they do know about it (I had a friend who was a PM there), but it's low priority...

Right. But you could create new users, not root but with admin rights, and enroll new keys.

It's actually horrible! Even key rotation is horrible!

My yubikey is getting to about 10 years old, and I have replacements for it but find it very difficult to switch. It will eventually fail as an things do and it will be problematic.

The problem is that I have several dozen accounts connected to it and I don't know all of them. So either I'm carrying and trying multiple keys at all times or not getting into a site that haven't been rotated yet.

Multiple keys on an all sites is also basically impossible. You need to register all the keys, and ideally those keys are in different places.

I’m going to need to work this out soon. I picked up a pair of new YubiKey 5Cs yesterday with their sale. I’ve been using a YubiKey Neo for years for U2F, TOTP and GPG.

Moving the GPG key is easy - though I might try using the FIDO2 support in SSH instead. However for every TOTP and U2F key I’m going to have to re-enroll the new keys… It feels like there should be a better way.

I've recently started to track my service dependency graph! So like, to keep using github I need my password store, my email and one of my two security keys. To use my email, I need...

Please contact me if you're interested, I will release the tooling I have.

It would indeed be nice if you could "cross sign", CA style, a new yubikey with an old one, and that would somehow get passed along to the various services.

I have not thought about the various attack vectors that this may or may not enable though.

FIDO2 with resident SSH ed25519 keys works great, just make sure the OpenSSH client and server versions on all the machines you’ll be using the key on support it. I wish there was a way to sign Git commits somehow using them instead of PGP.

There is as of Git 2.34 [0][1].

[0] https://github.blog/2021-11-15-highlights-from-git-2-34/#tid... [1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...

Oh nice! No more futzing around with GPG. You just made my day.

You can backup/restore FIDO2 keys via BIP39 on supported devices like a Ledger or Trezor.

So if you're travelling overseas for 3-4 weeks, you need to keep extras in all your different luggage/bags, just in case?

I keep an off-site backup at my parents house. Right now it includes a printed copy of my backup codes, so if my house burns down and everything is a total loss here, I at least don't have to start from zero. They live far enough away that my backup offsite backup can get to be a few months out of date but that's usually fine. (If I were to make a major change in something I'd make a special visit)

I don't want to spend a bunch of time when I visit to find that key and add it to all of my new accounts and hope I got everything - I want to make a backup of my current key right before I visit and when I visit, I just put the new backup key in the desk drawer and take the old one home with me.

Use a Ledger or Trezor which supports backing up the random seed allowing you to backup all current and future accounts in one shot.

That's what I do. I have a nano Yubikey installed in each of my computers. Plus a Yubikey on my keychain. I register all of them with each account.

All of the accounts require username / passowrd and the Yubikey. I'm not willing to not have a password.

I think this is the best approach, the one mobile key allows you to add your other devices as you use them so it's not adding a ton of overhead.

Do you only have 2-3 backups of your workstation?

I have much more backups of my workstation etc., should I now buy dozens of crypto hardware key thingies and constantly switch them around to match the backup disks?

For those who do offsite backups: Is an offsite backup possible across the Internet? Or do you have to physically drive the key to the offsite location?

When I create a new account somewhere, does that mean I have to move N backup keys out of their drawer to the workstation and register each of them on the account?

And how to even create a backup and keep it in sync?

With backup disks, it is a matter of shutting down the machine, removing one disk from the RAID1, and you have a backup (the removed disk is the backup). Or doing "dd if=..." if you don't use raid.

Is something as simple possible with those fancy crypto toys? Or is some arcane magic required to copy them?

Is this perhaps all as usual: An attempt to get more control and tracking of users, disguised as "security"?

With devices that support BIP39 backups like the Ledger or Trezor, you are backing up the random seed that generates all possible future accounts deterministically.

Backup once, setup 100 accounts, lose authentication device, restore backup to new device, regain access to all 100 accounts. Easy.

Why do people always say this? Do you not know how expensive they are?

Most people have smartphones which ship with WebAuthn so they are good to go. Granted phones are like $500+ so by contrast a Yubikey is a much cheaper alternative for a secondary backup device for most people.

AWS has entered the chat.

I killed a Yubikey in my pocket (without washing) after four years. Get two and keep the backup safe. https://adam-p.ca/blog/2021/06/backup-yubikey/

I want to have both, a hardware key and a password. A password alone always has to grant me access again, ideally without needing to register a machine too. Honestly I hate that this is so widespread already, I want my devices to be a non-recognizable ghosts for security purposes. An access log would be more appreciated.

I have a Yubikey and use it as a part of my passwords. But I would like to have a second master password that I only use in emergencies. Yes, it is easy to forget so make sure you don't. But a password that is rarely used is also rarely exposed to third parties.

To be honest, the most problems I see with FIDO is the lacking trust in the alliance of companies behind it but I don't know too much about the technicalities of FIDO.

Hear hear. I already have enough to worry about besides this little magical security wand failing/getting lost. I require a bullet proof method-of-last-resort mechanism in place for the inevitable day when the fob is no longer available.

I have abused and soaked every model of Yubikey. I even melted the casings off every model with acetone to lookup chip specs and Yubico responded by switching to a new unidentified glass hybrid compound no common solvents seem to impact.

In all cases the Yubikeys still worked even as bare abused PCBs. You need a blowtorch or a drill to break one.

This announcement is primarily not about hardware keys, right?

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