70
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
70 points (94.9% liked)
Fediverse
28313 readers
305 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Why would you need a password if you already have a private key?
Also, one possible way to manage private keys is to split the key (and the risk/burden) using shamir's secret sharing and use that process for key recovery if you ever lose it. For example you split it among 6 people you trust and to recover the key, 4 of them need to give you a fragment of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
Yea in theory you wouldn't need the password if you have the private key but here the key is only used for signing, maybe not for login. If it also needs to be backwards compatible. In any case, I don't think user-held private keys is viable.
Sharing with trusted parties... I dunno, I think again it's too technical and complicated to do it. And you'd need people on the platform you trust to already be there.
No, the key fragment is just a bit of text you can send to them by whatever secure side channel you want down to handing them a flash drive. Then when you need to recover the key you ask for it back
Normal non-technical people are never going to do this. It needs to be easy as clicking a button, otherwise it will never happen for them. Again, this is a neat technical solution but it completely forgets the human.