crypto frobs

Mon Mar 23 23:32:42 UTC 2020

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 7:00 PM Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/23/20 3:53 PM, Sabri Berisha wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> In my experience, yubikeys are not very secure. I know of someone in my team who would generate a few hundred tokens during a meeting and save the output in a text file. Then they'd have a small python script which was triggered by a hotkey on my macbook to push "keyboard" input. They did this because the org they were working for would make you use yubikey auth for pretty much everything, including updating a simple internal Jira ticket.
>

this is not: "yubikey is bad" as much as: "The user using the yubikey is bad"
Admittedly perhaps: "every time new token" sucks, and that's what (I
think michael thomas is saying below), but certainly the yubikey could
have been used for TOTP instead of HOTP and the user in question would
have been out of luck, right? :)

Almost all security 'features' are a trade-off between: "get stuff
done" and "get stuff done with an extra hop", making the 'extra hop'
as simple and natural as possible makes people less likely to do dumb
things like:
  1) pregen a crapload of tokens, store them on their probably
compromised laptop...
  2) aim a webcam at their rsa token and watch the change remotely
  3) hot-dog and sipping-bird toy to touch the thingy on their yubikey
token every X seconds...

>
> One of the things that got lost in the Webauthn stuff is that passwords per se are not bad. It's passwords being sent over the wire. In combination with reuse, that is the actual problem. Webauthn supposedly allows use of passwords to unlock a local credential store, but it is so heavily focused dongles that it's really hard to figure out for a normal website that just want to get rid of the burden of  remote passwords.
>
> Mike