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Comment by growse | Hacker News Reader

> I don't give a fuck if other people can't manage secure passwords.

Sure you do. When your local tax office / hospital / large data holder of your personal data has an administrative interface that only uses passwords, then the administrator gets fished and your identity stolen, suddenly you care a great deal.

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That seems like a separate problem, since no authentication mechanism can somehow force a competence floor onto your local government office. Even if passkeys become the industry standard (or even required by law) your local government office will always rise to the challenge to lose your data, leak your data, sell your data, etc.

Phishing isn't a competence issue. This is well studied. In practice, even security practitioners trained to be vigilant against phishing attacks fall to targeted ("spear") phishing attacks of suitable sophistication; that's the impetus behind phishing-proof authenticators like U2F and WebAuthn.

Phishing is a technology issue, not a user issue.

I work in the security space and fell victim to an internal campaign as they sent a very enticing looking email at a point where I was on leave and my grandfather just passed.

You simply cannot know what mindset youll be in when you get phished :)

Edit: To clarify i was itching to work because it helps distract me from the reality that someone so dear to me was gone forever. I didnt want to cancel leave though because my output would have been absolutely turdy

Can confirm, I know all about cryptography and security and the things, and I still got phished for a bunch of cryptocurrency. The only thing that saved me is that it was in a hardware wallet, so it was physically impossible to steal. Otherwise I was ready to happily paste my private key into the (official-looking) form and domain.

> Otherwise I was ready to happily paste my private key into the (official-looking) form and domain.

Sorry, why would you ever disclose your private key to some online forum? I can't see a situation where it makes sense.

Clearly there's something I'm not thinking of, so I'm genuinely curious

I think you misread the word "form" as "forum" there.

Ah you got me, though I don't think it changes that much.

Even with an online 'form' (presumably a phishing page) I don't understand why anyone would ever upload private keys for their wallets.

In the case of exchanges, users typically don't get access to the private key for the wallets anyway, so pretending to be an exchange to phish for something the victim can't even provide wouldn't make sense.

In the case of a local wallet, the whole purpose is personal ownership of the coins—which obviously becomes moot when sending the private key to some random person—so I don't see why a user would upload them in this circumstance either.

Though yes, the situation is certainly more understandable than GP posting private keys to an online 'forum' ;)

I don't think it changes that much.

There's overwhelming empirical and anecdata evidence people make mistakes and fall for phishing. If that doesn't change your mind that much, it's not obvious what reasonably could.

Problem is that passkeys aren't resilient enough to loss of the authenticator device, which means a fallback flow is always made available, that is vulnerable to phishing/MITM/social engineering.

This is even more pronounced thanks to the efforts to roll out passkeys to the masses. Most of them don't understand what they're getting into and are most likely gonna get themselves locked out quite quickly, which may mean recovery flows need to actually become more relaxed than they currently are.

I'm not interested in litigating the broader question of Passkey-only login setups, only in spelling out why the field cares so much about phishing-resistant authenticators, which password managers and random passwords do not provide.

Sure, but you're moving the goalposts. We're comparing a system that relies exclusively on passwords Vs one that relies on webauthn.

The operational competence of the dba is the same in both cases.

Or they store your password insecurely — plain text or merely “encrypted” with XOR.

I still see both of those regularly.

Everything boils down to some password or key (effectively a long password) access to some SQL instance.

Anything on top of that is just fluff. The database can still be compromised directly.

There's a difference between fluffy that's phishable (passwords) and fluff that isn't (webauthn).

Not all fluff is equal.

How is Webauth'n Crunch not phishable?

Most implementations throw about 20 "recovery codes" at you and at the absolute fucking worst possible moment while the user is trying to do something urgent, they say "save these in a secure place right now".

It's not 1, but 20 passwords that ALL give access to your account. Where do you think those codes go?

They are not only phishable, but they usually end up in a Google doc, screenshotted and pasted to Notion, or some other insecure place.

We're talking about webauthn, not recovery codes.

Keys are _not_ just long passwords. They're asymmetric. Feel free to steal any and all of my webauthn public keys.

Heck, here's one: "kty": "EC", "alg": "ECDSA_w_SHA256", "crv": "P-256", "x": "xYkEVgMClD28hXHn5JQjrgjRX3crmr0OhGiWKsLvxUY=", "y": "5lZZGFF6VrVubIHfRhGbvQBGpw6LcbP3/ZBVk7PqH0Y="

It's what you'd get if you somehow got into the db and decrypted it.

Now, do feel free to give me your nice symmetric secret password, since it's the same, yeah?

Keys can be symmetric or asymmetric depending on the algorithm.

From the standpoint of a non-technical user, they're not any different in nature; a password and a private key are both just strings that give full access to your account. One is easier to remember (password), one is harder to remember (key). The one that is harder to remember usually ends up in a Google doc, iCloud, or saved as a text file.

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