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by dane-pgp 1353 days ago
When you say "the FIDO Alliance", you mean the entity that runs a Metadata Service[0] which:

> provides organizations deploying FIDO Authentication with a centralized and trusted source of information about FIDO authenticators.

The aim of this centralized system is to allow revocation of hardware that doesn't meet their unchallengeable opinion of whether you've spent enough money on your device or not. They can similarly require that devices do biometric scanning[1], and be issued by your government, and require you to agree to lengthy (and self-updating) terms of use.

There are actually (at least) two different types of device attestation that FIDO support[2]. One uses a hardcoded on-device private key, that's common between 100,000 devices of the same model, which means that an attacker can brick 99,999 other people's devices just by extracting the key from their own device. The other method requires a certificate from a "trusted third-party Attestation CA", which presumably allows a malicious (perhaps government-mandated) CA to spy on (and filter) every login request you make.

This system is like a dystopian parody of the traditional model of web security, which had no need for "authenticators that have a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) onboard", and which only required CAs to be on a list that the user agent is in control of (and users can add their own CAs to). Instead, what FIDO are building is basically DRM for human identity, with all the corruption and failure modes that entails.

[0] https://fidoalliance.org/metadata/

[1] https://fidoalliance.org/specs/biometric/requirements/

[2] https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2020/02/12/fido2-deep-...