[snek]

Damn shame to see the internet move backwards because Google refuses to use the standardized APIs.

Edit: Usually HN is so angry about Google not following web standards but everyone in this thread seems to be in favor of Google trampling the WebAuthn standard. Weird.

[jrockway]

What sites could you sign into with a cryptographic second factor before Google launched U2F? All that was out there were easily-phishable TOTP tokens. Now you can register a security key and use it as a second factor on desktops and phones. It's pretty impressive, though unfortunate that ultimately the industry picked a similar-but-different standard.

What sites currently let me authenticate with WebAuthn? (Github still uses U2F, it seems.)

[phren0logy]

Dropbox uses WebAuthn. They are, as far as I can tell, the most significant site using it currently.

[ecesena]

Microsoft also supports passwordless login, the "novelty" of FIDO2. I just found it out yesterday reading this article [1], page 3 (it's in German).

Disclaimer: I make the Solo key that's mentioned in the article.

[1] https://www.golem.de/news/fido-sticks-im-test-endlich-schlec...

[agwa]

> What sites currently let me authenticate with WebAuthn? (Github still uses U2F, it seems.)

https://login.gov

[taeric]

Can I, though? I asked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19316509 to see if there was a way to build a habit out of my security token. Not only did I not get responses there, but I haven't actually found that many places that support using a u2f token. There are an some that support it ok, but all require me to use chrome and none seem to support using it at least once a day. (Or anything like that.)

[ecesena]

re: your thread.

Today the backup practice is to enable 2 keys in all accounts: one that you keep with yourself, the other that you leave in a safe.

There's been some experiments of creating copies of the master secret, e.g. [1]. Today you can do so either w/ u2f zero or with its upgrade solo hacker (note the hacker version), but we currently don't support it officially.

My personal advice as of now is to always have security key(s) + totp code. The security keys protect you against phishing, so if you click on an email link and get prompted for login, you're either safe (if you use the security key) or at least reminded about the risk (if you're used to use the security key but you don't have it with you at the moment). Viceversa, if you're directly logging into a website and you typed the url yourself, then totp offers the same security, so it's a totally valid alternative. Hope this makes sense.

[1] https://dmitryfrank.com/articles/backup_u2f_token

[taeric]

Ok, I thought the whole point was that I couldn't get a secret off a token. :(

My biggest concern is that I don't have a solid method to build the habit of using the devices. I started using pass to generate and store passwords. That doesn't work with just u2f keys, though. That I could tell.

[will4274]

> What sites currently let me authenticate with WebAuthn?

Microsoft sites like Outlook and OneDrive.

[alfalfasprout]

Duo push works decently well and is far more secure than eg; TOTP.

[cbhl]

In my opinion, the root cause of this is that Linux made a conscious decision to not maintain binary ABI compatibility with device drivers.

Android is open source, and Linux-based. The licenses allow phone manufacturers to fork Android and integrate it with devices that only have closed-source binary blob drivers, without involving Google. The end result is a bunch of phones whose kernels (and thus OSes) are impossible to update. (I am told that Microsoft found this sufficiently frustrating and that it decided it would write its own drivers for the vast majority of hardware.)

Linux has a Very Good Reason to discourage binary driver compatibility -- it would rather see those drivers be open-sourced under GPL and moved in-tree. But the end result has seriously hurt the security of more than two-thirds of Android users -- users who otherwise should be inclined to choose open-source because they are paranoid about security.

I think the right answer is to require folks to have Android Q+ to continue to use security keys with an Android account, but I imagine that's not a viable choice because the optics would be that Google is doing a "money grab" in exchange for security.

[admax88q]

Are you seriously saying that the reason Google hasn't implemented a _web_ standard is because Linux doesn't provide good enough support for binary device drivers?

That's just ridiculous.

[intherdfield]

Apparently, the two are related. From the post,

"We’ve recently learned that Google Accounts has slipped their schedule for using Web Authentication to register new credentials. This delay is attributed to security key support on Android being, for most devices, non-upgradable."

[amluto]

Huh?

Linux has had perfectly fine U2F 1 support for ages. All you need on a normal desktop box is u2f-hidraw-policy [0] and, optionally, the u2f CLI tools.

[0] https://github.com/amluto/u2f-hidraw-policy

[sametmax]

OpenOffice gained traction by supporting .doc files. VLC because it could read .wma and .mov files. Linux when it could read NTFS partitions.

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" is good practice in software, espacially in open source. You can't be picky when you are the underdog anyway.

[rstuart4133]

> Usually HN is so angry about Google not following web standards but everyone in this thread seems to be in favor of Google trampling the WebAuthn standard. Weird.

Maybe it's because according to the article "Google trampling WebAuthn standard" miss characterises what is actually going on:

> We’ve recently learned that Google Accounts has slipped their schedule for using Web Authentication to register new credentials.

[maxerickson]

How quickly would they have to deploy a new standard for it to not be trampling?

Do you think they planned legacy Android devices not being able to support the new standard?

[apostacy]

I'm more rustled to again see Firefox again try to emulate the worst of Chrome.