| HN Mirror

Y	Hacker News new \| ask \| show \| jobs

by pdabbadabba 4021 days ago

> I simply don't want a single place where all my passwords are available that isn't hardware physically under my control.

That makes sense. What would be really nice -- and what I had in mind -- would be some sort of device where the passwords were stored to which my other devices could easily connect to to access the passwords, sort of like a wireless dongle. (Though, really, even the wireless part is negotiable. I'd be happy to plug something in as well so long as it was easy to carry with me and supported the right connectors.)

Seems like a Kickstarter campaign waiting to happen.

4 comments

stouset 4021 days ago

And when the device dies?

If you're using a reasonably trustworthy password manager with a strong master password, your biggest risk is data loss, not mass password compromise. Syncing to multiple devices and cloud backups dramatically reduce that risk while only marginally increasing that of compromise.

link

shabble 4021 days ago

I'd make it so that under some very specific and hard to attack circumstances, it would be possible to make a backup of the keyring stored on a device.

Possibly only directly to another device, or maybe dump an encrypted blob to file or straight to paper (bitcoin printable wallet style).

That creates the risk of someone duplicating your thing, but you could have a 'number of times/date of most recent backup' entry obvious in your token UI, and hope people notice abnormal ones.

Protecting from a Chris Tarnovsky[1] level attacker who is probing your silicon is probably beyond the scope of a cheap consumer unit.

The best way I (IANACryptographer) can immediately think of is that your hardware dongle generates an very large internal (never leaves the device) pgp keypair. It can be allowed to back up your internal password database only when encrypted by that key, so it is literally useless except on that single physical device. You could then enroll the pubkeys of your other devices as backups onto it, and the backups would then be multisigned where any one of the associated keys has the ability to decrypt.

The password blob can then be stored jsut about anywhere, but is only decryptable and useable when embedded into the hardware device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Tarnovsky

link

shabble 4021 days ago

http://finalkey.net/ looks like a step in teh right direction, although I'd prefer to see something a bit more compact, and ideally with an independent user interface.

Something like a smartcard, with an eInk display and membrane keypad, that lets you select a credential and then provide it to the application via keyboard injection, or where possible over using challenge-response over the existing smartcard interface so the secret never leaves the card.

There was a hardware bitcoin wallet not that long ago that was further down this road, I think maybe https://www.bitcointrezor.com/ ?

The biggest problems I can see for usability are:

* what can you do when you don't have it with you? - One answer would be some printable one-time tokens such as the fallback that google auth uses, that you can carry separately.

* Can it be backed up? In theory, the keys are in there permanently, and cannot be accessed by design. Having some Super Mega Master Password that allows a full copy to be made onto a second device that can be kept elsewhere might be sufficient.

* How to handle situations where you can't use USB/NFC for it to communicate. It would need a display to give you a code/your password to enter or something.

A smaller issue would be if you're planning on fully interoperating by generating and storing individual site/system credentials on there, it would have to handle the idiocies of various systems that impose password restrictions like special chars, numbers, maximum length, etc. If it's autotyping as a fake keyboard, would also need to deal with the 'retype your password' field somehow.

All in all, I think it's totally doable, but I'm not sure I'd trust a kickstarter-like project to get the details right, given the general (maybe just perceived) level competence of kickstarted projects. Crypto Is Hard. You can't really start having a 'stretch goal $10M - hire a real cryptographer to check we didn't twiddle our nonces' or something.

A decent and well-reviewed thing like this is probably somethign I'd buy though. I've just got a Yubikey to play around with, and need to start setting that up for SSH and other keys to my more important accounts.

link

gherkin0 4021 days ago

> Something like a smartcard, with an eInk display and membrane keypad, that lets you select a credential and then provide it to the application via keyboard injection, or where possible over using challenge-response over the existing smartcard interface so the secret never leaves the card.