• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Emojis are known to break systems in certain circumstances due to the way they're interpreted in certain character sets.

    I guarantee people doing this will not only lock out their own accounts, but may even freeze some authentication servers.

    https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-brick-an-iphone-send-some-emojis

    https://www.itechpost.com/articles/75762/20170119/brick-iphone-using-emojis-plus-tricks-dont-know.htm

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The website should feed your password straight into a well known hashing algorithm or key derivation function that has undergone a decade or more of careful scrutiny, without any other processing. The output will usually be a fixed length base64 or hex string.

      There's a short list of about three options that are currently considered acceptable, and a few more are probably fine but are a little too easy to crack these days (e.g. anything that shares the same math as bitcoin… what if someone throws a mining datacentre at your password?)

      If the site breaks, maybe you don't to be a customer of that service.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        make one account with emoji password to test their system, if it break, good, go create hour account somewhere else

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        It's not the processing on the server that's the problem. To reach the server the password needs to go through several layers of character encoding, if any of them fails the server will receive something different from what you meant. And when you try to login from another device and the layers will be different you'll effectively be sending a different password.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          The same character encoding that would break emoji would break a significant portion of the words names, so if your system can't handle it, then you deserve all the trouble that you run into.

          Unicode isn't that hard.

    • Arin@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      auth servers breaking from emojis would be hilarious, pretty sure that's why older auth servers only allow certain symbols in passwords

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that's right and deserved

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      Sounds like a crappy implementation of the authentication server then, and the sysadmin deserves a paddlin' for not stripping non-UTF characters (or making sure they work).

      My problem with using emojis as part of the password would rather be that while I might be able to enter them on my personal Android phone using the exact keyboard app I have installed right now, I might find myself struggling on a desktop computer or any other phone that doesn't have this exact keyboard installed. After all, the graphical representation of the same emoji might look different there, and there is a chance I couldn't even recognize it.

      So if anything, I'd say use a non-UTF keyboard like Thai or Chinese, but then a standard character in that specific type. Keyboards layout can be installed across devices and are fully standardized, even if the same character looks slightly different.

      • Username@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        Stripping characters from passwords, great idea! Right up there with truncating passwords that are too long.

        • viking@infosec.pub
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          11 months ago

          Not from passwords, from password fields. In the same way that ", ' and various types of brackets can't be used since they could be used for code injections.

          • Username@feddit.de
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            11 months ago

            That's not how any of this works.

            First of all, stripping passwords is never okay. You can reject the password and let the user choose a new one, but never just modify it on your own.

            Then, if your system is at risk of code injection by certain characters in user input, please just shut it down and never turn it on again.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            Doing that is actually a great way to tell attackers that you're vulnerable to that type of attack.

            Bypassing those front end restrictions is super easy, and the attackers don't need an account or a password to attack you.

            It's like putting a sign that says "lock fragile; don't tug" on the door to your business.

      • kuneho@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        also some OSKs put whitespaces after inserting an emoji, some doesn't. there's no unified emoji input method yet.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        There's no such thing as a non-UTF8 character. You mean non-UTF8 bytes? If a system sees those, it should reject the entire input, not try to patch it up.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      OTOH, there is only one character set that matters, and any system using a different one is, by that fact alone, broken.

    • 50gp@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      and there are many trash implementations that dont recognise something like :emoticon: as shortcut and turn it into emoji, no no you have to use emoji keyboard to type them

      • Funwayguy@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Hahaha, I wish.

        You would be amazed at how ancient and poorly maintained many web servers are on the modern internet. SQL injection still consistently make the top 3 web app vulnerabilities as of 2021. If that isn't being sanitized properly I don't expect emojis would be handled much better.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        For that particular bug, yes, but there have been many other variations on that theme and not limited to Apple tech. I've seen it nuke an email send for example because the SMTP server choked on emojis placed in a subject, to, or from line.

        • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
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          11 months ago

          But why wouldn't it make sense to need to pull the cab off of a pickup truck to change the spark plugs?

        • El Barto@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That's true for all car designers. You're referring to the shitty designers, though.

          Architects don't get involved in the actual construction of a building either.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            11 months ago

            Oh they do. They come to tell you that the safety protocols you've implemented are interfering with their design.

            They'd prefer it if it looked pretty and then just fell down and light breeze thank you very much

    • Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      All the apps I've used recently use QR codes (or similar measures, like a sync code) that has you log in from the phone, so it should work anyway!

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        But not all apps, sadly, I just experimented it with Crunchyroll, and saw my dad struggling with a crappy app called Vix yesterday.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        In my experience the only one that works with any degree of reliability is YouTube. Even the Netflix one can be fairly intermittent.

        Also a lot in the time you'll go away and the hotel you're in will have a smart TV and the software was last updated in 2011 so you have to sign in on the device.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        I've had to manually type in passwords on a TV several times in the last few months because sometimes the login for even the biggest brand-name services is just broken.

  • kureta@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Security expert reveals surprising way to induce headaches

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      Security experts don't actually have to work on corporate IT systems.

      So you've set your password to contain a 😇 have you?
      Ok so how are you going to type it on this desktop computer keyboard here…
      Yeah I thought not.

      I'll just go reset your password shall I?

    • vamputer@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      I like doing entire phrases with some rhymes thrown in. Makes it easier to remember them.

      "BonyTonyMoansHe'sOnlyGrownLonely" has a shitload of characters, and a full sentence (even a nonsensical one like that) is more memorable to me than a random handful of disparate words.

      The more ridiculous, the better. (And, naturally, don't forget your numbers and symbols)

      EDIT: Actually, no idea why I made it all one group of words. So long as spaces are in the password's character space (and they very well should be if friggin' emojis are), there's nothing stopping you from doing an entire, punctuated sentence- other than that we've been conditioned not to think of a password that way.

      "Skinny Kenny's friend, Mini Ben, has 20 chins." That should be a fully-acceptable password with 46 characters (48 if you add the quotes), capital letters, numbers, and special characters.

      • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        You can't compare a 46 random character password to a password composed out of words, the entropy of each is very different. Your kind of password is vulnerable to dictionary attacks which are way more common and easy than brute forcing every possibility. A 50+ characters unique random password for each service that is stored in a password manager which is encrypted with a 20+ characters random password is the most secure and future proof (for now).

        • Aatube@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          If the attacker doesn’t know that you’re using a dictionary password, then dictionary attacks probably won’t be their first choice. I want to remember these passwords across devices and on guests.

          • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 months ago

            Like someone else said on this thread; that's just security by obscurity, which is bad. Dictionary attacks will be one of the first (brute force related) attacks attackers will use because word passwords are incredibly popular (though admittedly of fewer words: VeryBigDog34 etc…), and relatively easy to do. I agree that having the password across different devices is somewhat of a challenge with a password manager, but not impossible. My very long and complex password is all down to muscle memory by this point, I couldn't tell you what it is from memory.

            Also you shouldn't use the same password on multiple things and if you don't use a password manager you will need to memorize a lot of different passwords.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I love it, Bitwarden has supported generating passphrase style passwords for a while and it's basically that. It's my go-to these days.

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Got a source on that?

        Edit: plus brute forcing is just one scenario. I think the xkcd comic refers to using passwords in online services, and those usually have some sort of rate limiting.

    • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.

      • notapantsday@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they're a lot easier for humans to remember.

        There are enough words in any language that it's virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they're in the dictionary.

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          11 months ago

          Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.

          • Jesus_666@feddit.de
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            11 months ago

            And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:

            • Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
            • My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody's going to guess "make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on" but it's easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
            • My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you'll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.

            There's a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.

          • ゴン太@mander.xyz
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            11 months ago

            You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.

            "Ronaldo doesn't grill 76 Canadian Tacos."

            Or whatever

      • djdadi@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn't know " look for exactly 4 words"

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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          11 months ago

          That's just security by obscurity. It's one other strategy of choosing passwords that a bruteforce attack is going to try if it gets popular

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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            11 months ago

            That's not what security by obscurity means. And going by your definition, all passwords are security by obscurity.

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it'd be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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            11 months ago

            If you're using a password manager you don't need phrases you can remember, you can generate even more secure passwords. Or start using passkeys.

              • Aatube@kbin.social
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                11 months ago

                Guest machines too. And I sorta prefer whichever browser/OS I’m using’s implementation because they’re usually styled similarly.

          • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            I am, and I'm not jumping through hoops of making up a password sentence for every new website. I let Bitwarden take care of that for me.

            • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              Just use these methods for the pws you either need to know (like your password manager) or don't want stored for whatever reason, like your bank. Otherwise, yeah, just let your password manager generate a password for whatever site.

        • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          It's as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I'd rather staple my forehead to a telephone pole before I ever think about using an emoji in a password. Those things are abominations!

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Out of curiosity, what makes you say so?

      Edit: Oh. Did a "Wooosh" happen to me right now? Are you being ironic and referring to the XKCD thing about how to make a secure password using words in phrases?

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think OP is conflating the use of emojis in passwords with the use of emojis by the general public.

        Yes, it's annoying to read stuff like "Hi 😃😃😃😃 I am Bob ♥️♥️♥️😎😎😎😎," but that doesn't mean that using them in passwords is a bad idea.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          11 months ago

          Well they have to be the same on different devices, like you log in to Lemmy on your PC and then on your phone. Also sometimes it seems the icons change, or there are new ones and maybe old ones are removed …

          • El Barto@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Emojis are standardized. They may look different in different devices, but the code of a "raised hands" emoji will always be the same, just like the code for A is always the same.

            Removing old ones could be a problem, though.

            • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              What if I am using a device that doesn't support emojis? wouldn't I need to learn the code for each emoji I have used in a password?

              • El Barto@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                That's a good question, and yeah, I guess you'd either avoid using emojis or accept the fact that they're not universally supported.

                Having said that, some people use non-ascii characters in their passwords, such as Πwhich is a valid letter in some alphabets, and they'd run onto the same issue.

              • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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                11 months ago

                Yes

                But how many modern devices don't somehow support emojis though?

                And how many of those you need to enter a password in?

            • Droechai@lemm.ee
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              11 months ago

              Just like a gun is standardized to a water gun for some and a real gun for others?

              Edit: I get your point, ita just if you memorize your password with emoji icons different icons would screw up your tries to log in

              • El Barto@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                If you search for "gun" in your device when selecting an emoji, just pick whatever comes up. Done.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Sounds great where it works but I'm sure most systems would reject an emoji or make you type out some overly complex password in addition to your emoji.

    • Toribor@corndog.social
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      11 months ago

      Honestly you'd be surprised how many places it just works magically. I was surprised to find that Office365 users could use emojis in names for Microsoft Teams which had no problem syncing those accounts back to an on-prem Active Directory. You can use emojis to name a whole SQL database, let alone users/passwords on it.

      I keep wondering if I need to figure out how to turn that off but it hasn't caused any problems. It's definitely sketchy looking though when you see a bunch of normal usernames and then suddenly one is just ten snowman emojis in a row.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Emojis are just a string of special characters that get recognised and replaced by an image anyway. It is the same as using those special characters separately.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      It's all just Unicode so in theory a password system shouldn't think that emoji or any more interesting than any other character. To a computer the letter B and the emoji ✈️ equivalent in that they're both just normal characters that one can type.

      Sort of, emoji are usually treated as two or more normal characters so ✈️ might be equivalent to BB. But the basic point is the same.

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      People who use them tend to spam the hell out of them. Like, 8 of the same emoji. And they use them every other sentence. It's obnoxious, you only need one or two to get the point across.

    • pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      💀💀💀💀💀💀💀🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🚣👍👍👍👍👍👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 sigma

      the emojis and text above are a part of the reason

    • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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      11 months ago

      Back in my day we only had 95 printable characters, and that's the way we liked it! /s

    • Polar@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Antisocial people.

      It was the same on Reddit. All of the people who despised emojis were often posting in really cringe and incel related subs.

      My use of emojis sky rocketed after I started dating. They are fun and convey emotion really well.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        I'm convinced emojis are what has been missing from language for a long time. They are great way to portray emotions through texts, which otherwise could not be achieved.

        This way there is a difference between:

        "You are so amazing 😁👍"

        and

        "You are so amazing 🙄 "

        • mbp@lemmy.sdf.org
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          11 months ago

          If I'm going to be relaying through to people strictly over text as much as I do these days, I better have a way to articulate it with the right emotional range to match my sparkling personality ✨

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      They didn't exist yet when I was an early teenager, all we had were emoticons that might be replaced by images by the forum software, so of course I think they're stupid /s

      Without sarcasm, it is a good thing we have standardized symbols now and don't have to implement emoticon replacement into forum or chat or social media software. If only because half of such implementations replaced any occurrence of the number 8 followed by a closing parenthesis with 😎 even when that wasn't the intended meaning (one can think of many other times one would end a parenthetical statement with the number 8).

  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net
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    11 months ago

    Last week or two I've been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I'll take the crypto.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I'm not sure what the passkey advantage over long unique password in a password database is.

      Well, KeepAssXC just got passkey support so I guess it doesn't matter much

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        With passkeys, your browser and the website exchange a public-private key pair then make up long random one-time "passwords" every time you login but only use them to check they each still have the right key.

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I guess I'm gonna need the answer spoonfed to me. I think I understand how the tech works but I don't understand the advantage over a complex non-reused password. Maybe keyloggers, if it's one-time thing?

          • coffinwood@feddit.de
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            11 months ago

            The advantage - from my very incomplete understanding - is that your passkeys cannot be phished or stolen from you. So only you from your device can log-in to the site. Which leaves me with the question, how cross-device passkeys work.

            • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              There are different ways.

              One way is to use an encryption module on the device that, rather than storing the keys just encrypts the keys and holds an encryption key that you can't extract, and can do various crypto operations.
              Now you ask the module to do a secure key exchange algorithm with the new device, meditated by a party the module trusts, like apple or something.
              Now both devices share a secret key, and they trust that the other is owned by the same user because the owner verified with apple who then signed the exchange messages.
              Old device decrypts with the old key, and encrypts with the new key, never letting the data leave the secure module. Send the data to the new device which can do the reverse, and both devices forget the shared password.

              Overall, minor weaknesses like storing keys in the cloud encrypted by a key derived from a password that the cloud never sees, while objective weaknesses, are still significant net improvements to security over passwords.

              • coffinwood@feddit.de
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                11 months ago

                Thank you for explaining. That's a thing most sites leave out: tell people how the keys cannot be stolen while still working on a different device.

            • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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              11 months ago

              That would be a really nice advantage but yeah, I wonder how cross-device passkeys or recovery passkeys would work

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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            11 months ago

            There are lots of advantages:

            • No need to worry about password encoding, like this emoji debacle for example. Actually there's no need to worry about passwords in general anymore, no more worries about lenghts, encoding, character space, remembering them etc.
            • It eliminates that scam where attackers set up a site on a domain that looks like the correct one, because the domain is part of the protocol.
            • It eliminates phishing for 2FA because login only works on your device anyway and there's nothing you can be tricked into giving away to an attacker.
            • If attackers break into a site and steal the public keys they can't use them for anything.
            • Since the whole process is automated between servers and browsers and also standardized, it can be upgraded seamlessly and continously, you can upgrade the protocol, the key lengths, the encryption cyphers etc. with zero impact for the user. New upgraded versions can be distributed to both servers and browsers and they'll just use the highest version they both have.
            • 2FA is a core part of the protocol, but again in a way that eliminates phishing: it's basically a way to unlock access temporarily to one specific key in your key vault. You can use a master password, or an USB key, or TOTP codes, or biometrics (fingerprint or face) etc., but NOT cellular texts (SMS) anymore because the vault stays on your devices, no need for another party to send you anything.
            • Syncing your vault online and over multiple devices, as well as backup, are also a core part of the approach and will eliminate the worry that you drop your phone and you're screwed forever.

            The downside is that there's been a whole bunch of tools and apps and services built around passwords for decades and converting all that mass to passkey tools will take a bit.

            There are some other tradeoffs like, right now for example I can reasonably print all my passwords and TOTP codes on a few sheets of paper and achieve an "offline" backup in case of untimely death and so on, it's going to be a bit more cumbersome with passkeys. But I expect there will be ways to optimize that as the technology evolves.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            Passkeys, under the hood, use a way of proving your identity that doesn't require you to actually send your password, and also doesn't require you to send your username either.
            Because of how it's implemented, the system managing the passkeys also gets to authenticate that the website is who it says it is.

            So no private data actually gets sent anywhere, but you can prove your identity while also checking the identity of the site you're talking to, like the SSL lock icon but automated. It's often implemented such that the device that holds they keys can't actually have them stolen from it, and it's integrated with a biometric sensor.
            This means it's possible to have a high degree of confidence that the person logging in is physically the same person who created the credential, and not just someone who had their password stolen.

            The final perk, is that if you're using something like a phone with a fingerprint scanner, passkeys work as two factors of authentication, despite only feeling like one.
            Because the phone verifies your identity via fingerprint (something you are), it can then unlock the key that is uniquely available to the phone (something you have).

            Combine that with being generally easier to use, and it's pretty clear why most security experts are pushing them. Security that users will use is better than security they won't, and finally we have easier to use security that's also better than the more difficult options.

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    11 months ago

    this feeeels like the stupidest idea ive ever heard… its not like theres really an emojii standard applied as universally as text, across devices or applications… the transforms that happen… this seems fraught with terribleness

    am i missing something?

    • MonkeyKhan@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Emojis are standardized exactly the same way as text is, both are defined by the unicode standard. They might not be rendered uniformly, the same way that text rendering depends on the font.

    • Salamendacious@lemmy.worldOP
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      11 months ago

      I thought Emojis were a set standard but how they're rendered can change. So whatever it is that identifies the heart emoji is universal but iPhone, Samsung, Google, etc might render that heart differently.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        How they're rendered is a set standard now too. For example there was a bit of an issue where the gun emoji could be a water pistol pointing left or a revolver pointing right… and when it was combined with a person emoji… that could lead to… issues. It's a water pistol everywhere now.

    • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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      11 months ago

      Although I agree it is risky, emoji are unicode characters, just like any other unicode character. If, and that's a big if, the programmers do their job right, it shouldn't matter if you use an emoji or a random kanji. It's all just another character. That said, I don't trust programmers enough to run the risk. Your password might work fine on the website but then fail on the mobile app.

      Someone else said "good luck on the desktop", but Windows actually has an emoji picker built right in. Win+. will bring it up. Another fun fact, usernames and computer names both support the full unicode set on Windows, including emoji. Some fun can be had with that knowledge. I haven't tried it on Linux or MacOS yet.

    • HunterFrisby@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Yes there is, Unicode (Emojis). I would say most modern devices/systems utilize it too. The reason they may look different from device to device is because the presentation style can be modified by vendors, somewhat similar to using different fonts to make letters look styled.