1. SQRL is far less vulnerable to social engineering than a password. If a password can be remembered by its user then it can be coerced out of them. No one can remember an SQRL private key. Passwords can be captured by keyloggers, SQRL keys cannot.

2. The one point about SQRL no one mentioned and the reason it is far more secure than a password, the SQRL private key is never sent anywhere. The server encrypts a random string with the SQRL public key. This can only be decrypted with the SQRL private key on the users computer. The decrypted string is then sent to the server to prove the user is the owner of the private key.

3. SQRL is not “new untested technology” The SQRL protocol just uses existing public/private key technology in a better, more secure way than it is currently used.

Your first two objections are really the same (Authentication and identification is combined, and Single point of failure). It is clear that the weakness of this system is that it relies on a single key and if that key is compromised, all hell breaks loose. But it relies on the idea that it is easier to protect a single key that should never leave a user’s mobile phone (except to have one offline (if not physical) backup copy of that key at home in a safe place). And ideally that this key resides in a locked down environment (iPhone), with an encrypted disk, hardware enforced unlock password plus an additional level of crypto within the app. It is true that if all of these fail, the system collapses. But intuitively I would expect it to be far more secure than passwords.

Password managers are only practical for people who only ever access the internet from a single machine. And they do not offer more protection over the sort of scenario where SQRL would fail, i.e. if someone cracks your password manager, he has access to all your accounts like he would on SQRL (accessing the SQRL key is exactly equivalent to accessing the password manager master key). In both cases you have no other choice than to reset your account on every single website one by one.

The same can be said to your third objection. The SQRL website claims that if offers a protection against phishing attacks which I disagree. But that is no different from any password based attack. In fact it is marginally better as the attacker would only gain access to a session, not a permanent access to the website, more akin to a session cookie theft, which I agree doesn’t help much.

But keep in mind that most people do not use password managers, and even fewer use only website specific passwords. And computers are far more easily breached and have way more untrusted code running than modern mobile phones, so moving your key to that platform is rather a good thing. I don’t think SQRL can claim that it brings security to a level that will beat any intelligence agencies, but it does look to me far more superior than password based solutions.

]]> http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/10/debunking-sqrl/#comment-474821 Fri, 24 Oct 2014 14:18:30 +0000 http://security.blogoverflow.com/?p=1095#comment-474821 Hi, Anderson. Ad homenim attack aside, Steve did mention some prior art related to SQRL back in https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-424.htm. At the bottom of the transcript you’ll find this:

Tom: …The point of this is all of this stuff, as Steve just mentioned, is already available, free and open source. It’s just putting it together and making it work. And hopefully some patent squatter doesn’t try to come along and claim they invented it. But that’s always a risk with anything you do on the Internet.

Steve: I did look at what Google had done, because of course when I came up with this I thought, wait a minute, how can nobody have thought of this before?

TOM: Right, right, uh-huh.

Steve: And so I spent a couple days really looking hard.

There could be patent protected prior art that Steve didn’t find. He has a few patents of his own but he’s not a patent lawyer: he’s mostly a technology person.

Remixing existing technologies and ideas into something new is still something new.

Steve Gibson did not invent this, and he does not own any IP in this. It seems as there are several patents that protect this kind of authentication method. According to this guy (http://www.michael.beiter.org/2013/10/04/steve-gibsons-sqrl-is-not-really-new/), this protocol is neither new nor public domain, and one should do a legal evaluation as well as a more thorough security evaluation before using SQRL.

Seriously, if Gibson doesn’t even do prior art research before blasting out “his” idea, how much time did he actually invest in the security of it?

]]> http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/10/debunking-sqrl/#comment-266345 Sun, 19 Jan 2014 22:07:38 +0000 http://security.blogoverflow.com/?p=1095#comment-266345 I say what anyone says with a very large bucket of salt. But you have outsourced your arguments to that website which, in my humble opinion, is a giant waste of time.

But I don’t intend to fight over what you said. Instead I will offer a link as well, where readers can see Steve Gibson’s daily video podcasts.

Then choose for yourself.

Someone is not /just/ right or wrong. Usually it’s a bit of both.

http://twit.tv/sn/

]]> http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/10/debunking-sqrl/#comment-249710 Fri, 03 Jan 2014 20:53:20 +0000 http://security.blogoverflow.com/?p=1095#comment-249710 Another alternative: https://www.autosign.me/

]]> http://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/10/debunking-sqrl/#comment-225316 Wed, 27 Nov 2013 11:35:50 +0000 http://security.blogoverflow.com/?p=1095#comment-225316 I’m a user experience designer with an interest in human factors in security. While I’m not qualified to judge the technical merits of SQRL over other authentication methods, the assertion that “long, unique and randomly generated passwords” are part of a “gold standard” of security betrays the underlying reason why the design and implementation of security-related systems is in such a sorry state today. I would go so far to say that the author of this post is in fact a cause of the problem, and can offer no solutions at all. Here’s why:

1. It is demonstrably wrong to make people take on the work of ensuring their own security by having (amongst other things) to remember long and different passwords for every system they access. Doing so has encouraged people to seek workarounds that do the opposite of what is intended. Passwords are today anything BUT convenient when used in what the author insists is “the right way”. We need to kill off this condescending attitude towards idiotic end users who don’t understand what’s good for them.

2. It is counter-productive to delegate “security” to a technical priesthood who constantly chant that it must be applied as strongly as possible in all situations in which identity or data are involved. It prevents ordinary people developing a practical understanding of risk and the trade-offs between applying different levels of security in return for other advantages. For example, I should be given the choice to have NO security if the situation might warrant it. I should be able to consider what that means in the context of what I’m trying to do. To constantly deny my that by insisting on long passwords and the mysterious paraphernalia of retrieval questions, non-unique user names and email address verification is hugely damaging to the way people interact with online systems, not to mention the people who operate those systems.

The wider issues of security and identity management in the digital age, and how ordinary people navigate and establish a culture around those issues are only just becoming clear to us. The attitudes demonstrated in this post are not helpful. They will not solve any of the underlying causes of the problems the author professes to care about.

I welcome SQRL. The sooner we understand that digital security is about people, and not technology, the better.