{"id":928,"date":"2008-02-26T10:15:02","date_gmt":"2008-02-26T18:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=928"},"modified":"2008-02-26T10:20:51","modified_gmt":"2008-02-26T18:20:51","slug":"ben-lauries-single-passwords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=928","title":{"rendered":"Ben Laurie's “Single Passwords”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given his latest post<\/a>, I guess\u00a0I got the gist of\u00a0Ben Laurie's\u00a0proposal for using\u00a0what I'll call “Single Passwords”<\/a> rather than “Single Signon”:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Kim Cameron, bless him, manages to interpret one of my most diabolical hungover bits of prose ever<\/a>. I am totally with him on the problem of pharming, but the reality is that the average Cardspace user authenticated with nothing better than a password (when they logged into Windows).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow.\u00a0 I appreciate the blessing from Father Laurie, but this is kind of a “We're going to die one day, so who cares if we die tomorrow?” type of argument – surprising for a priest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While it's true that pharming is a challenge for the operating system as well as the browser,\u00a0let's not\u00a0seriously\u00a0equate the\u00a0dangers of entering passwords into browsers (a malleable experience, the goal of which is to be infinitely and easily modified by anyone<\/em>) with those involved in booting up your PC (a highly controlled environment designed to allow no modification<\/em> and use a secure desktop).\u00a0 It's true that both involve passwords.\u00a0 But\u00a0the equation is\u00a0simplistic, best summed up as: “Tables have legs, people have legs, therefore tables are people.”<\/p>\n

Anyway,\u00a0I'm sympathetic to\u00a0Ben's concerns\u00a0about portability:<\/p>\n

“Furthermore, if you are going to achieve portability of credentials, then you can either do it in dreamland, where all users carry around their oh-so-totally-secure bluetooth credential device, or you can do it in the real world, where credentials will be retrieved from an online store secured by a password.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don't dismiss dreamland – isn't that what iPhones want to be?\u00a0 But we do need lightweight roaming.\u00a0 Using an online vault secured by a passphrase is a reasonable way to\u00a0bootstrap a secret\u00a0onto a\u00a0machine.<\/p>\n

But not\u00a0the browser!<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rub is:\u00a0 once a user gets into the habit of typing this secret into the browser<\/em>, she's ready to be tricked.\u00a0 I'll go further.\u00a0 If\u00a0 the vault one day accrues enough value,\u00a0a browser-based system\u00a0WILL\u00a0fail the user\u00a0–\u00a0sooner or later.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ben concludes:<\/p>\n

“If you believe the Cardspace UI can protect people\u2019s credentials, then surely it can protect a password?<\/p>\n

“If it really can\u2019t (that is, we cannot come up with UI that people will reliably identify and eschew all imitations), then how will we ever have a workable, scalable system that includes recovery of credentials after loss or destruction of their physical goods?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There's\u00a0food for thought\u00a0here.\u00a0\u00a0Start to take advantage of the engineering in CardSpace, and you inherit significant protection in terms of both phishing and pharming.\u00a0\u00a0So if Ben implements his “Single Password” this way, he\u00a0could start to\u00a0be reasonably confident\u00a0that the “function of the\u00a0password” is what is released, while the\u00a0password is guarded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using an online vault secured by a passphrase is a reasonable way to bootstrap a secret onto a machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,23,44,5,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}