Comment by cyberax

8 days ago

Except that banks can (and do) already require proprietary apps to generate one-time passwords, often requiring official iOS and Android phones. It's not some nebulous future, it's happening now.

And you can't really blame them. A TOTP 2FA from your password manager is not secure. It WILL be hacked sooner rather than later. And SMS is horrible, expensive, and unreliable.

So far, only FIDO keys provide hardware-backed security ("resident keys", not passkeys) that is nicely segregated into self-contained hardware module. And it does not require you to run a full end-to-end DRM-ed stack.

If you _want_ true privacy and security, that's pretty much the best case you can hope for.

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cyberax

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crote  8 days ago

Except that those "self-contained hardware modules" are actually rarely "self-contained" but usually an integral part of a smartphone running a huge bunch of mostly-untrusted code and that the containment keeps getting breached, of course.

The only difference is that banks will now blame you for any losses caused by hacked devices because it is on paper "unhackable" with a well-updated device, so it is now your fault that their crappy bank app's security was broken.

And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.

  • cyberax  8 days ago

    I'm using a Yubikey that is permanently plugged into a USB-C port on my laptop and another one in my dock at home.

    > Except that those "self-contained hardware modules" are actually rarely "self-contained" but usually an integral part of a smartphone running a huge bunch of mostly-untrusted code and that the containment keeps getting breached, of course.

    And it actually doesn't matter if the secure device is designed correctly. Providing a secure channel over untrusted networks is something that we can do easily.

    > And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.

    I can. I'm using US Bank and it supports my Yubikey-bound WebAuthn credential just fine.