<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div><div>On Apr 12, 2016, at 5:39 PM, Tony Arcieri <<a href="mailto:bascule@gmail.com">bascule@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 8:28 AM, Ron Garret <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ron@flownet.com" target="_blank">ron@flownet.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Some hardware tokens have an input device built in (usually a push button, sometimes a fingerprint sensor) which needs to be activated before the token will operate, but these are still subject to phishing attacks</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Not to rain on your parade, but if you're talking about authentication contexts, U2F solves the phishability problem by deriving domain-separated keys per origin, so it's not possible for an attacker to leverage it for phishing purposes.</div></div></div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>This HSM is much more general-purpose than a U2F token. It could be used as a standalone bitcoin wallet a la Trezor. It can be used to decrypt messages and display them on the built-in display so that even an adversary with root accesss to your laptop couldn’t read the cleartext. The firmware doesn’t support this yet, but it’s a mere matter of programming :-)</div><div><br></div><div>But even U2F tokens can be phished for some value of “phished”. It’s true that you can’t extract the keys, but if an attacker owns your machine and you have a U2F token installed, the attacker can log into any site you can log into. Even if the token has a button you need to push to activate it, it’s probably not hard to fool most users into pushing the button to authorize an authentication for an attacker.</div><div><br></div><div>With a display, the token can say, “You are about to authorize…” and describe exactly what it is that it is being asked to do so that you know what you’re authorizing in a way that an attacker cannot control even with a completely compromised client.</div><div><br></div><div>rg</div><div><br></div></body></html>