• 1 Post
  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • JakenVeina@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Passwords have problems, but passkeys have moreEnglish
    3·
    22 days ago

    As I understand it (and assuming you know what asymmetric keys are)…

    It’s about using public/private key pairs and swapping them in wherever you would use a password. Except, passwords are things users can actually remember in their head, and are short enough to be typed in to a UI. Asymmetric keys are neither of these things, so trying to actually implement passkeys means solving this newly-created problem of “how the hell do users manage them” and the tech world seems to be collectively failing to realize that the benefit isn’t worth the cost. That last bit is subjective opinion, of course, but I’ve yet to see any end-users actually be enthusiastic about passkeys.

    If that’s still flying over your head, there’s a direct real-world corollary that you’re probably already familiar with, but I haven’t seen mentioned yet: Chip-enabled Credit Cards. Chip cards still use symmetric cryptography, instead of asymmetric, but the “proper” implementation of passkeys, in my mind, would be basically chip cards. The card keeps your public/private key pair on it, with embedded circuitry that allows it to do encryption with the private key, without ever having to expose it. Of course, the problem would be the same as the problem with chip cards in the US, the one that quite nearly killed the existence of them: everyone that wants to support or use passkeys would then need to have a passkey reader, that you plug into when you want to login somewhere. We could probably make a lot of headway on this by just using USB, but that would make passkey cards more complicated, more expensive, and more prone to being damaged over time. Plus, that doesn’t really help people wanting to login to shit with their phones.

  • JakenVeina@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Sysadmins slam Apple’s SSL/TLS cert lifespan cutsEnglish
    152·
    22 days ago

    Automated certificate lifecycle management is going to be the norm for businesses moving forward.

    This seems counter-intuitive to the goal of “improving internet security”. Automation is a double-edged sword. Convenient, sure, but also an attack vector, one where malicious activity is less likely to be noticed, because actual people aren’t involved in tbe process, anymore.

    We’ve got ample evidence of this kinda thing with passwords: increasing complexity requirements and lifetime requirements improves security, only up to a point. Push it too far, and it actually ends up DECREASING security, because it encourages bad practices to get around the increased burden of implementation.

  • JakenVeina@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•C++ try not to add footguns challenge (impossible)English
    43·
    2 months ago

    It’s the capability of a program to “reflect” upon itself, I.E. to inspect and understand its own code.

    As an example, In C# you can write a class…

    public class MyClass
{
    public void MyMethod()
    {
        ...
    }
}

    …and you can create an instance of it, and use it, like this…

    var myClass = new MyClass();
myClass.MyMethod();

    Simple enough, nothing we haven’t all seen before.

    But you can do the same thing with reflection, as such…

    var type = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
    .GetType("MyClass");

var constructor = type.GetConstructor(Array.Empty<Type>());

var instance = constructor.Invoke(Array.Empty<Object>());

var method = type.GetMethod("MyMethod");

var delegate = method.CreateDelegate(typeof(Action), instance);

delegate.DynamicInvoke(Array.Empty<object>());

    Obnoxious and verbose and tossing basically all type safety out the window, but it does enable some pretty crazy interesting things. Like self-discovery and dynamic loading of plugins, or self-configuration of apps. Also often useful when messing with generics. I could dig up some practical use-cases, if you’re curious.

  • JakenVeina@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•YouTube on TVs is cramming ads down your throat even when pausing videosEnglish
    41·
    2 months ago

    I think the big reasons for most people boil down to one or both of two things:

    A) People having 0 trust in Google. I.E. people do not believe that paying for their services will exempt them from being exploited, so what’s the point?

    B) YouTube’s treatment of its content creators. Which are what people actually come to YouTube for. Advertisers and copyright holders (and copyright trolls) get first-class treatment, while the majority of content creators get little to no support for anything.