Passkeys

(I think this is worth pondering, but I don’t mean it too seriously—don’t panic.) Are the sizes of post-quantum signatures getting you down? Are you despairing of deploying a post-quantum Web PKI? Don’t fret! Symmetric cryptography is post-quantum too! When you connect to a site, also fetch a record from DNS that contains a handful of “CA”...

Chrome 118 (which is rolling out to the Stable channel now) contains support for creating and accessing passkeys in iCloud Keychain. Firstly, I’d like to thank Apple for creating an API for this that browsers can use: it’s a bunch of work, and they didn’t have to. Chrome has long had support for creating WebAuthn credentials on macOS that were...

If you look at the structure of the signed messages in WebAuthn you’ll notice that one of the fields is called the “signature counter”. In the previous long post I said to ignore it, which is still correct, but here’s why. Signature counters are optional for the authenticator to implement: it’s valid for a security key not to have a signature...

Update: Evan let me know that Whisper solved the voice recognition problem. He has a wrapper that records from a microphone and prints the transcription here. Whisper is very impressive and the only caveat is that it sometimes inserts whole fabricated sentences at the end. The words always sort of make sense in context, but there were no sounds...

(This post is nearing 8 000 words. If you want to throw it onto an ereader there's an EPUB version too.) Introduction Over more than a decade, a handful of standards have developed into passkeys—a plausible replacement for passwords. They picked up a lot of complexity on the way, and this post tries to give a chronological account of the...