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Comment by austinbv | Hacker News Reader

The problem with any key based auth or biometric auth is a user can be compelled by LEO to hand over private keys or open a biometric lock.

Passwords are protected by the 5th amendment.

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For most people living in a western democracy, this is a pretty minor consideration to their threat model.

Most people default to what is easiest. Before TouchID, most iPhone users did not lock their phones with a password. Making biometrics readily available and default means more people are walking around with more secure devices than would be if we only encouraged people to use the absolute most secure options available.

The standard answers for these things is to use both; they’re not mutually exclusive, and for important things you almost certainly want both.

The expansion mentioned in the article is explicitly passwordless.

The actual exchange with the server is using public key cryptography. How you unlock the key material locally could be a number of ways: PIN, password, fingerprint scan, voice recognition, etc

I think the main problem I’m never buying into Fido keys anymore is that mine point blank stopped working and I had to sweat to get back in website that supported it, hopefully back then not many, but if identity is the responsibility of a close piece of hardware if it breaks you’re out

Normally you can assign multiple keys to one identity. That's baked into WebAuthn and pretty much all the implementations I've seen do it.

The litigation on that matter is ongoing. What you said is not true right now. If you try to fight an order for your password, you'll wind up in court and probably lose, and then have to chose whether to act in contempt.

> Passcodes can therefore be compelled if their existence, possession and authentication are "foregone conclusions," the court said in the August 2020 ruling, determining the 5th Amendment's foregone conclusion exception applied in the case.

https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/us-supreme-court-nixe...

What if you forget the password?

Same as if you forget your safe combination, you're charged with contempt of court.

You can be compelled by the court to divulge passwords. It's one of those areas of interpretation of law and there's precedent against it as can be searched for.

For apple devices the keys are stored in a secure element. You need your password to access when booting, or after certain timeouts. Until then you can’t use faceid/touchid

Why do we need another AuthN protocol? We should extend OIDC as needed instead of again trying to reinvent the wheel.

In WebAuthn you're actually in possession of your own identity (or, to be more precise, your identity is established between you and website).

In OpenID, OAuth and OpenID Connect the paradigm is completely different, where your identity is provided by someone else.

Yes I get that but I think OIDC could be extended to cover that too whereas the Authenticator or iDP is the local face scanner kr other biometric and then the rest ie exchange of token etc stays the same. That way there won’t be two completely separate path and that will defeat the purpose of SSO. And it looks like there are already some implementation of this https://www.bioid.com/facial-recognition-app/

Because the interaction with the hardware authenticator is local.

OIDC and WebAuthn can work together.

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