PKI already prevents man in the middle attacks.

Users constantly fall for website impersonation, this can be solved by your password manager it just has to check the host and the certificate of the login page.

Now browsers don't let password managers do that, I wonder why.

But lets say you don't like the fact that passwords are sent over the wire. I get that I don't like that either. You could just take a random token and have an hmac signature on all your requests, for most cryptographic hashing functions that would probably be quantum secure as well.

But lets just say you don't want to have a shared secret because you know servers get hacked all the time. Totally legit, I like the way you think, asymmetric cryptography it is.

How could we possibly do it? Like ssh with pki on top.

The spec could be literally these 25 words:

Do what ssh does but request a PKI signed certificate instead of a key signature from the server and validate it against your known CAs.

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danpalmer 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Passkeys are the consumer implementation of PKI to solve these problems.

There's functionally no alternative for consumer logins, and certainly not one that doesn't require learning what PKI is. "like SSH with PKI" is a bit "draw the rest of the owl".

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throwawayffffas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

PKI is already in place for domain verification. SSh with PKI is exactly what it sounds like, "passkeys" without attestation, hardware, corporate bullshit.

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supertrope 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is the entire usability/footgun issue with SSH public keys. For the tech savvy being able to copy and paste id_ed25519.pub into their online account settings would be a dream. But who will train the masses to do that? A lot of people would accidentally paste their private key. Just like how journalists learning OpenPGP emailed over their private key compromising it. For low tech savvy people having direct access to key material is an anti-feature. They can lose it. They can leak it or be phished into giving it up. They don't want to manually sync it between devices or generate per device keys and enroll all of them. Then companies exploit this need for user friendly design to create vendor lock in.

	▲	throwawayffffas 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My point is your browser, password manager could do just that, all the attestation, hardware keys, required user confirmation etc, authorized clients etc are all a power ploy from FIDO to own peoples authentication.

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danpalmer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cool, why can't I SSH into Netflix? And how should my non-technical parents set up SSH on their phone?

	▲	throwawayffffas 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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crote 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> this can be solved by your password manager it just has to check the host and the certificate of the login page

Which is exactly what Passkeys does. And it also has built-in functionality to prevent any kind of "Oops! We changed our login method, just ignore the warning and retrieve it manually." social engineering, which a user would often genuinely see when random services move their login page to a different url.