Re: A Somewhat Critical View of SOP (Same Origin Policy)

> On 17 Sep 2015, at 14:51, Brad Hill <hillbrad@gmail.com> wrote:
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> 3/ Is FIDO excluding all other authentication and security tools
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> No. I believe there is a place for something else that is less dependent on
> large origins for their trust relation... --Rigo
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> Again, with respect, this fundamentally misunderstands what FIDO does.
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> FIDO works directly between end users and the sites they visit.  There is no third party dependency, let alone any relationship to "large origins" AKA "super-providers".
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> This is exactly the beauty of de-coupling strong authentication from Identity,  FIDO makes strong authentication instantly available to every web application at every scale, without having to establish *any* trust relationships with third parties.  The relationships between users and applications are unmediated.
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> How you exchange Identity or AuthZ assertions is an independent problem.  Federation is one way (which happens to have a large installed base and history of successful deployment) but it's an orthogonal issue.  FIDO can work with this, but it can work as well with other technologies.  Whatever shortcomings you may think that federation systems as deployed today, they are not shortcomings of FIDO.  
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> You can even do an Identity-entangled authentication with a client certificate, and then re-authenticate with FIDO over that secure channel.
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> FIDO is just strong authentication, sans identity.  So rather than trying to hang the sins (whatever they are) of Federated Identity around FIDO's neck, you might instead consider whether perhaps the fact that we've failed to deploy strong authentication successfully at scale for so many years has anything to do with the fact that so far we've always made it dependent on a grand vision of Identity.  
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> Maybe we can do better by solving one hard problem at a time and using composable solutions.  To me, being able to make independent choices about the method and strength of my authentication, and whether and how I share information about my identity, seems to be much more respectful of the principle of User Choice than any entangled solution can ever be.

I think Rigo was conflating a number of points which when seperated clearly I think you can actually agree with:

1) that FIDO is a good answer to the password problem

2) that FIDO is a good answer to establishing personhood, removing the need for captchas

  because the verificator comes with a cryptographic key, identifying the type of device, and the server knows that a some personhood verification was made.

3) that FIDO does not exclude linkability solutions 
   
   it states so in the architectural document that it works with OpenID, OAuth and other federation protocols. As such it does not exclude certificate based authentication such as that provided by TLS, e-id systems, or much simpler cryptographic protocols such as those I mentioned earlier that would be compatible with HTTP/2.0

  • Andrei Sambra's first sketch authentication protocol      
     https://github.com/solid/solid-spec#webid-rsa 
  • Manu Sporny's more fully fleshed out HTTP Message signature
     https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cavage-http-signatures-04 

 4) that FIDO does not solve all privacy problems

   for example not those that arise by having all information centralised on some huge servers. Eg. if in the Soviet Union the only computer system one were allowed to connect to were one owned by the party, and one were forced to do this with FIDO, one would nevertheless not say that people in this hypothetical Soviet Union using this system had any real privacy.
I am invoking a very exagerated imaginary case just to make the point clear.
 
All the best,

   Henry 

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> -Brad
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Received on Thursday, 17 September 2015 19:08:05 UTC