Hi Phillip,
I'm not able to figure out the merits of your proposal, but I see one major 
obstacle: Google have a de-facto monopoly (80%) on browser technology and your 
proposal seems to require a rather substantial upgrade.

That is, unless Google buys into whatever you propose, it simply put gets 
nowhere.

As an example Google recently launched a payment authorization system which in 
spite of using state-of-the-art technology like FIDO, still requires you to 
handover card numbers in CLEAR to merchants (who do not need card numbers, but 
receipts from the payment network that they are/will be paid).

I early proposed that Google should consider using encryption and a "wallet" to 
keep virtual cards in (for getting away from physical cards altogether), like Apple Pay, 
but they did not even respond to this request.

Anders
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/570#issuecomment-972578433

On 2022-05-22 23:28, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
I am looking for people interested in discussing the following proposal to 
create a profile of TLS Client Authentication certificates to enable 
transparent Web Site authentication in Philadelphia:

I have a three step plan for eliminating Password Authentication

1) Deploy an open standards based, E2E secure password vault
2) Transition Web sites to use of public key authentication
3) Deploy a 2FA type scheme to address 'ceremony' use cases

I don't want to get into detail here, but I believe the trick to eliminating 
passwords is to deploy a password management solution in phase 1 that creates a 
sufficiently large base of users whose devices are provisioned with the 
necessary private keys to make use of public key auth practical.

So, I had assumed that this was all about enabling FIDO. But when I look at 
what I want to achieve and what legacy deployments provide, I suddenly realized 
I can do everything I need using TLS client auth. The only question is what the 
BEST way to do it is going to be.


So I have running code that can provision key pairs and credentials to every 
device Alice owns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrBv717w8yY 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrBv717w8yY>

It would not take a great deal of extra effort to provision certificates into 
the Windows/MAC/etc keystores so that IE, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. 
etc. can all make use of the certificates. Its just a question of writing a 
script.


I am pretty sure I can get 'something' to work. But I would appreciate some 
help from folk who are closer to the real-world implementations.

Reading through the specs, I think we can make it so that after an (optional) 
one time registration, Alice can just use the Web site without the need to ever 
log in ever again.

The only reason Alice would ever need to repeat registration is if the Web Site 
had some policy requiring Alice to affirm that yes, this really is her device 
and she agrees to terms. That is what I call 'ceremony' and it is not an 
authentication issue. I have another way of addressing that issue.


As far as I can tell, all that I really need is to write a certificate profile 
for BTCA certificates.

The thing that I am dropping here is the notion that certificates are bound to 
anything other than a key. So all this is telling the site is that this is the 
same person who came to the site before. It is not providing the user 
credential PKIX is really all about.

I do have some questions though. In particular whether using X.448/Ed448 certs 
is practical.

The big downside to my current approach is that the certs that are used are 
going to be super-linking identifiers. But we are currently losing that fight.



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