
Ask HN: What Will Replace Passwords? - rawgabbit
Is FIDO Alliance the way of the future or something else?
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ralston3
Passwords are just access secrets. Access secrets and always have, and always
will be around. The implementation changes, not the idea.

With that said I believe the next generation of implementations will involve
encrypted biometrics. Face ID sucks in that I have to hold my phone to my
face. But it’s amazing that I don’t need to type a string password.

Biometrics is the future imo

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sparkie
Biometrics represent identity and not authority. This misconception will be
the cause of many a security fail during the 21st century.

Authority comes from the user's mutable grey matter - not their immutable
genetics.

~~~
ralston3
Yea my comment is in terms of identity not authorization. I didn’t read the
FIDO part

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jayp1418
Something like this

[https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/)

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mjmj
[https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm](https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm) was
designed for that possibility.

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sparkie
Bitcoin's BIP32 (Hierarchical deterministic wallets) could be part of a
solution. Currently they're used for bitcoin wallets, but they are more
generally applicable for creating hierarchies of private/public key pairs, not
necessarily attached to bitcoin addresses. A single private key and chaining
key is all that is necessary to rematerialize all of the other keys in the
hierarchy - a "master password".

A public key is superior to a password. It has more entropy to begin with,
more than enough to resist brute force attempts, and it is sufficient, by
itself, to establish an encrypted and authenticated communication with the
holder of the corresponding private key. The key holder can sign messages
asserting their ownership of the private key without revealing it, or can
prove, if somebody already knows they are the owner of a public key, that
they've signed a document that nobody else could have generated such signature
for without possession of the private key.

For 2FA protocols and such, it may be possible to use threshold signatures to
have messages signed by multiple parties which a verifier can verify at least
M of N parties contributed to the signature without revealing necessarily who
each the M parties are. There's much greater flexibility that can be gained
here than simply having 2FA, which is often really just 1FA because it is done
by SMS or some other weak form of authentication which can be vulnerable.

In addition, BIP39 (Mnemonic seed phrases) provide a more intuitive way of
representing the initial data used to create the master private key. A RNG
generates 256 bits of entropy, adds a checksum of 8 bits, and segments it into
24 chunks of 11 bits. The chunks each represent a word in a 2048 word
dictionary, and the word phrase is recorded for future. The word phrase, when
hashed, generates the master private key and chaining key for use with BIP32.
Optional passwords can be used in conjunction with the word phrase to
establish multiple disjoint key hierarchies from the same set of words.

This combination is now used in most bitcoin software and is fairly well
understood by most bitcoin users. It's supported by several hardware
wallets/HSMs, and likely many more will be coming. The burden is on the user
to write down and safely store a 24 word phrase, plus optional passwords.
There are some products on the market which can preserve this information in
the event of natural disasters.

A missing part of the puzzle is to establish the relationship between
identities the user cares about and the key paths in the hierarchy. Current
conventions use path's such as `m/0'/1'/1` to mean the second child of the
second child of the first account in the hierarchy. This doesn't carry around
any information about what this specific key is used for - so there would need
to be a separate tree stored somewhere (eg, user's device, backed up in cloud)
which maps identities to paths. Access to this file would at most, reveal the
identities the user has with different services, but would not reveal any
private keys which could be used to access those services, as they're stored
independently - preferably on a HSM which requires physical access.

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lihan
Face id

