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- Hacker News
- It is hard to find the content for all of the glitzy ads on this site.by ted_dunning
- But when you do, there are glaring holes these people uncovered.by ted_dunning
- There's ads?by ikidd
- "You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page" pops up in the strangest places...by Groxx
- "Oh no, someone might pirate my advertisement, and show it make even more people see it for free!"by Terr_
- It seems like I have to trust more things that aren't very intuitive and are out of my control for passkeys to really be secure. For passwords, I only need to trust myself. I trust that I don't lose them, don't re-use them, and don't fall for phishing attacks.
Of course I also have to trust that whatever service I'm authenticating to does their part correctly, but that's the same either way.
I'm going to continue to use passwords.
by SoftTalker - This is an insane and uninformed take. The malware described in TFA can even more trivially harvest passwords, which have never lived in a TPM. Passwords offer no security benefit over passkeys.by loeg
- >4. Using the hash of that handshake, the attacker interacts with the victim’s TPM and uses the extracted identity key to sign the handshake hash together with the assertion request
Huh? If you have this level of local privileges you can just read session cookies from the browsers store? I guess stealing all the keys is notable, but you can manipulate any password manager with this level of access right?
What's the threat model here, that synced passkeys should be secure in even in situations involving compromised clients? How?
- It's not that simple. The stolen file has no clear text passwords and ideally, these passwords can only be decrypted on the right hardware with user confirmation. Of course, eternal and repeated confirmation requests are an anti pattern all their own, but the cloud attestation service not verifying the hardware sounds like a really glaring omission.by ted_dunning
- At least for accounts you want to keep very secure, session cookies are probably very time-limited. Stealing a passkey ensures persistent access in the future.
But I largely agree, if they're able to do this on your system you're already hacked and they can do a ton of very bad things.
by vel0city - >that synced passkeys should be secure in even in situations involving compromised clients?
I think that is the idea actually. By using secure hardware features it is in theory possible to secure the passkeys even in the case of compromised clients. Like how the iphone uses a security coprocessor to store the decryption keys and face id info out of the reach of iOS.
But this isn't overly concerning since it's still at a minimum as secure as passwords in a local compromise situation.
by Gigachad - Boy I’m so tired of people trying to make clever attack names. They don’t help remember things, there are too many.
So all 3 “pass-ta-key” attacks are not attacks on passkeys, they’re attacks on the Google vault.
And if you get access to the vault, then you get everything. OK. And if you get access to a synced traditional password vault, then you get everything.
So… meh. These are bugs, they will be fixed. Good on them for disclosing them. But this does not prove that passkeys are terrible. This does not make them less secure than random passwords.
If it wasn’t for the fact that they just happen to be getting passkeys, seems like this wouldn’t be worth a headline or discussing at all. And if they have this level of access, then they also get all the standard password credentials in the vault too, right?
by MBCook - > And if you get access to the vault, then you get everything. OK. And if you get access to a synced traditional password vault, then you get everything.
No? It’s why 2FA exists. I have an email with password of 5 characters only and the password leaked decade ago, never changed it and no one accessed it because it has 2fa. I can share my whole password vault and I would not care about it because it’s useless without 2fa. Not the case with passkey, glad I never set it up on any of my accounts, pass+mfa is good for 99% of accounts (not sms obviously), rest are public private keys.
by tamimio - Have we standardized a way to backup and export passkeys yet? Do websites commonly allow multiple passkeys to be registered?by nixpulvis
- These are endpoint malware attacks, not attacks on Passkeys per se. This is already a game-over position for an attacker to be in.by tptacek
- Yes, there's no security bug here of any kind. The "novel attack surface" already assumes the attacker can execute code as your user.by lostmsu
- I thought the point of storing secrets in hardware TPM and not giving them out into userspace (i.e. passkeys instead of passwords) is protecting against malware as well.
And they claim that for Chrome on Windows:
> Unlike a legitimate user flow that requires user interaction and device unlock, this attack shows how malware can obtain the required signature silently, without user consent, biometrics, device unlock or elevated privileges.
by asqueella - This is someone related to a major TPM pet peeve of mine: the TPM only really cares about global device state and has no concept that a device may be a multi-user system, have multiple processes with different security levels, have multiple tenants, etc.
For example, it really ought to be possible to seal a secret such that it can only be unsealed if PCRs have certain values (the usual TPM thing) and the requester of the unseal operation is tagged by the OS (software TCB) as having a certain identity. The latter part is entirely missing from the TPM spec. (The identity could be a hash of the process, just a UUID, or just about anything else as long as it was reasonably well associated with the process in question. Obviously there are subtleties here.)
If the TPM worked the way I wanted, an unprivileged process running alongside Chrome would be completely unable to use the TPM to pretend to be Chrome.
by amluto - I'm not even sure why OS exposes TPM directly to applications instead of having a virtual store for credentials that could be backed by whatever.
UPD. nvm, that's not what's happening
by lostmsu - Wouldn’t that be the job of the software TCB to ensure only the appropriate user is given access (and prevent the user from accessing the TPM directly obviously)?
The TPM validates the state of the software TCB, and the software TCB validates the state of the lower layer, and so on.
by Nextgrid - Good for awareness but its not Novel at all. Its an incomplete, sensational and one sided PR by a given company
1. There is nothing novel about this, its a known behavior and has been in public domain for a while
2. The article talks about syncable passkeys, however it fails to bring into discussion about the concept of Backup eligible and Backup state which are core to this topic.
3. The core selling point for passkey is its phishing resistant capability which is not even discussed once in the article
4. The authenticator implementation gives a lot of flexibility to the party implementing it and it also creates a room for abuse. There is a trade off between usability (synching credential between devices) and security.
5. Its just a glorified managed password which is PHISHING RESISTANT so still a lot better choice than using passwords alone.
by sandeepkd