(I think this is worth pondering, but I don’t mean it too seriously—don’t panic.) Are the sizes of post-quantum signatures getting you down? Are you despairing of deploying a post-quantum Web PKI? Don’t fret! Symmetric cryptography is post-quantum too! When you connect to a site, also fetch a record from DNS that contains a handful of “CA” records....

Chrome 118 (which is rolling out to the Stable channel now) contains support for creating and accessing passkeys in iCloud Keychain. Firstly, I’d like to thank Apple for creating an API for this that browsers can use: it’s a bunch of work, and they didn’t have to. Chrome has long had support for creating WebAuthn credentials on macOS that were...

If you look at the structure of the signed messages in WebAuthn you’ll notice that one of the fields is called the “signature counter”. In the previous long post I said to ignore it, which is still correct, but here’s why. Signature counters are optional for the authenticator to implement: it’s valid for a security key not to have a signature...

Last week’s blog post was rather long, and had a greater than normal number of typos. (Thanks to people who pointed them out. I think I’ve fixed all the ones that were reported.) This was because I saw in reviews that iOS 17’s voice recognition was supposed to be much improved, and I figured that I’d give it a try. I’ve always found iOS’s recognition...

(This post is nearing 8 000 words. If you want to throw it onto an ereader there's an EPUB version too.) Introduction Over more than a decade, a handful of standards have developed into passkeys—a plausible replacement for passwords. They picked up a lot of complexity on the way, and this post tries to give a chronological account of the development...

As Twitter is having a thing (agl@infosec.exchange, by the way) it's nice that RSS is still ticking along. To mark that fact as we reach the end of the year, I decided to write up a list of books that I've read in the past 12 months that feel worthy of recommendation to a general audience. Flying Blind Boeing was once a standard-bearer for American...