Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon7000 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, yeah, tracking prevention features basically completely break cross-domain authentication. There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth (or make the user experience a lot easier). While there are workarounds these days, sometimes it does require deep changes in how auth works

View on HN

> There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth

I am not a web developer, but I would disagree with that.

Either web standards respect privacy or they don't, but I would not sacrifice privacy for anything.

Firefox was right to prevent tracking, it highlights how webstandards are just not good. I something doesn't work properly in a firefox private window, to me it should not exist.

The status quo appears to involve handing over your account password to your chosen client. That's worse than this.

If you don't trust your matrix client, why use it at all?

It's also a bit disheartening to see Matrix putting all that "Log in with Google", Apple, Facebook etc so prominently on their login page. The whole idea of decentralised services was getting out of those walled gardens.

Yeah, I would argue it's less about removing trust from the client (which will ultimately get an auth token in addition to secrets and plaintext messages) and more about allowing for centralized authentication and authorization policies.

But you already trust your client with all the private keys and message plaintexts for your account.

I struggle to see why I should trust it with those things but not the account password.

my google account has way more power over me than whatever i ever wrote in matrix in my life (ever, ever)

Not necessarily, you could give restricted access to a client

Authentication requires the opposite of privacy. If you don't want to be identified, you can't restrict anything to your identity.

If I'm authenticating with server A. I shouldn't have to carry ephemera from server B. A can interact with B on its own if necessary.

Bubbling up these architectural details to the front end is a symptom of the webdev cargo cult coming up with broken ideas that get fossilized as the status quo.

With OIDC, both occur: the client is redirected to the authentication server where they directly authenticate, then carries a token cross-domain back to the service. Finally, the service validates the token against the auth server.

The alternative would be something where I enter my Google username/password on random websites, and trust that they will forward it to Google and not do anything nefarious. This is less secure and less private.

It kind of depends. See Kagi Privacy Pass ("Allows you to use Kagi Search with Privacy Pass, which cryptographically ensures that Kagi cannot tie that request to an account and allows for further privacy and anonymity."): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

... which requires an addon to the browser, or for it to be built in specifically for that company.

That's not something companies like Matrix can use. If you're installing software already, why not skip the browser engine and install a full Matrix client instead?

I wasn't responding directly to Matrix's use of MAS. More generally I aimed to make the parent poster aware of a new technology that allows for private authentication, which they claimed was impossible.

Privacy Pass is currently being standardized by the IETF, so we may see more widespread adoption eventually: https://privacypass.github.io/

Just to make the claim clearer: it can't matter what the authentication mechanism is.

If a Privacy Pass token is needed for access to your email, then redeeming the token tells the service you (the client) can access your email. That's identified you.

This is why I said it depends [on whether the service needs to identify you.] In some cases, identification is not necessary for authorization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com