7 ms·

Persona - Mozilla's decentralized and secure authentication system

194 points by 00joe 14y ago

lukev 14y ago
Other than the benefit of using strong crypto under the hood, I'm not sure what benefits this has over a system like openid. It has about the same level of interactional complexity, and at the additional cost of requiring browser support. If we're going to have browser support anyway, I'd rather just use standard two-way SSL and put the work into developing better UI and private key distribution systems for it. It's even more secure and has a great user experience once you've set up the key in the browser and authorized it to the site.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  The benefit is orders of magnitude better usability. I couldn't get users to grok OpenID, this just needs an email and password. How will my mom log in to an SSL-certificate-requesting site from another computer?
  - lukev 14y ago
    This has pretty much the same end-user experience as OpenID, unless I'm misunderstanding something. The user still has to sign in to the IdP.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      You're underestimating how familiar someone's email address is versus an OpenID URL whose significance the user doesn't know and whose use she can't grasp.
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Agreed. URLs as an identifier are completely alien to non-technical folks. Even I think the notion is odd. They just don't make any sense. Plus they are hard to type correctly. Email addresses don't have these problems.
        reidrac 14y ago
        Although I think you're right, I can't understand why they didn't try to "fix" OpenID and started a new thing instead. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/ That said, I'd love they succeed and we have finally something that works well and it's not under company-X's control.
        fmarier 14y ago
        One of the reasons why we couldn't just "fix" OpenID is that we wanted a scheme that would be privacy-sensitive. With OpenID, the result of the site redirecting you to the IdP (and then the IdP redirecting you back to the site) is that the IdP can get a trail of every website you're trying to log into. That's pretty fundamental to the way OpenID is designed.
    - wmf 14y ago
      In OpenID you have to enter your IDP URL and then optionally sign in to the IDP. In Persona you will just click a button (because your browser knows your IDP) and then optionally sign in to your IDP. A huge difference.
- shantanubala 14y ago
  Usability involves more than one target audience: it also has to be easy for developers to integrate. BrowserID (Persona) took me minutes to implement. On a non-trivial project, it may take a couple hours. The beauty of this is the fact that it still works without built-in browser support. It's designed to be a forwards-compatible API that only becomes more usable with time. Additionally, email is an excellent way to establish a user's identity, and the fact that it's designed around email makes it easy for a regular person to understand its authentication flow. The problem with SSL is that it is an all-or-nothing technology. There's a chicken and egg problem: people won't make good UI for it until it's widely used, but people won't use it until it has a good UI. Persona provides an implementation of BrowserID that has a decent UI, and the user experience will only get better with time as more people use it. The chicken/egg problem is solved there, but two-way SSL right now is practically unusable for anyone who isn't very familiar with it (most people). Using an email address is very familiar, though.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    I've forgone traditional auth in favor of Persona because there are just too many advantages. The user might already have an account, the flow is very good if they don't, it takes literally three minutes to integrate django-browserid (or whatever it's called now) versus skinning quite a few templates for all the login and reset forms, it saves the user from having to remember yet another password, etc etc. I couldn't be happier with a signin solution. It even complements my legacy solution very well, you can see a demo at http://www.yourpane.com http://www.yourpane.com (click "Persona", never mind the email field.)
StavrosK 14y ago
There was a post about this yesterday, but I'll upvote it because it needs all the exposure it can get.
y0ghur7_xxx 14y ago
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580986 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580986
jpxxx 14y ago
I can't come up with any reason why this isn't going to be massive. The password problem is the single most frustrating and alienating issue I can think of for normal users.
- gambler 14y ago
  Two big issues so far: it still uses email for password resets (without alternatives that I know of) and it doesn't work without JavaScript. I hope both of them get addressed.
  - fmarier 14y ago
    The fallback identity provider (at login.persona.org) does use email for password resets, but other identity providers will likely use other mechanisms.
    - gambler 14y ago
      I hope so, but why not do the right thing in the default identity provider? Lately, there have been tons of high-profile hacks that boiled down to taking control of victim's email and resetting passwords to other accounts. What's seems to be the best response possible from web developers? Is it: a) Demand that all your users use Gmail with enabled two-factor authentication, then smugly blame them for all security issues if they don't. b) Stop using emails for password resets, since you don't really know how trustworthy your users' email providers are.
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        Because they just went in beta and there's tons of other stuff to iron out first?
      - Flimm 14y ago
        One of the ways crackers gain access to a user's email is by guessing their password, a simple task when a huge number of users use the same password everywhere. With Persona, only your email provider (and the persona.org fallback) have your password (two passwords in the case of the fallback), hashed or not. If you're already a password ninja and use a different and unpredictable password on every different site without forgetting them, Persona isn't an improvement in security. If you don't, as most users don't, Persona makes authentication more secure and more user-friendly at the same time. With Persona, your weakest point would still be your email provider, which is why it would still be wise to recommend two-factor authentication for your email. If you're already a password ninja and use a different and unpredictable password on every different site without forgetting them, AND you have enabled two-factor authentication with your email provider, Persona IS an improvement in security. This is because, with Persona, having two-factor authentication for your email would automatically mean two-factor authentication for all your websites as well.
Nux 14y ago
How would I log in from a friend's computer with Persona? How about from an Internet cafe; how safe would it be? Persona looks like something that lock's you into a certain device or at least makes it harder to log in on device's that are not your own. I'd rather they made OpenID less scarry (to average Joe) instead.
- Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
  You really shouldn't login from any non-secure terminal. I have catched even pros doing that mistake with production systems. It's major fail!
  - Nux 14y ago
    Major fail or not a good part of the world does not own their own computer.
- fmarier 14y ago
  Logging into a different device is not a problem, you just get a different certificate in that device's browser and it allows you to login in the same way. When you use a computer that's not your own, Persona keeps the session time very small. Of course, when you're done using that computer, you should ideally clear cookies, just like you would if you used OpenID or Facebook on a shared computer.
- ozten 14y ago
  Please try this today. It's one main reason The Times uses it on their Crossword product... This is safe on a public computer or shared device, if you logout. Persona also has some UI around public versus personal devices.
eslaught 14y ago
Are there any good descriptions for how Persona works? I can find plenty of developer documentation on this site, but I can't seem to find a good, concise description of what parties are involved and what the protocol is, etc. (Maybe I'm not looking deep enough? Anyway, thanks in advance.)
- fmarier 14y ago
  This talk gets into how the protocol works without getting too much into the crypto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY
  - gambler 14y ago
    I just watched the video. So, apparently, the long-term goal is to have email providers to support this and sign user certificates. I'm still not clear on what information a certificate would contain. More importantly, I really dislike the answer to second question from the audience. Even when the system is fully supported without fallbacks, hacking person's email account will grant the attacker ability to log into all websites as the victim? I already am quite concerned with how much control over everyone's identities services like Gmail have. If I understand it correctly, Persona will give them more direct control over user's identities. It's only decentralized in a sense that different email providers will be able to implement it separately, and verify identities of their users. I hope I'm missing something from the big picture here.
    - inportb 14y ago
      > Even when the system is fully supported without fallbacks, > hacking person's email account will grant the attacker > ability to log into all websites as the victim? With or without Persona/BrowserID, your email account(s) is the key for logging into a whole bunch of other Web services, since it is already used for resetting passwords and such. Persona/BrowserID does not solve this problem. The big picture is that it makes distributed identity easy for the average user to grok.
    - Flimm 14y ago
natch 14y ago
Authentication mechanisms and they way they are implemented can have bleedover into the ability of a user to maintain control of their anonymity and privacy. Has there been any writeup that explains the potential impact of Persona on privacy? Not just the impact when used as intended, but also any unintended effects?
- callahad 14y ago
  I'm not aware of any standalone articles, but something of that nature would be really fantastic. Such an article would probably be best if written by someone outside of the Persona team.
  - ygjb 14y ago
    Just a further comment, anyone interested in writing such an analysis or document should contact us with any questions!
- Flimm 14y ago
  There's an hour long video discussing the measures taken to protect the user's privacy, given by Ben Adida, one of the developers. It's 12 months old, but I believe the protocol hasn't changed enough to make the information out of date. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDSh3osE4GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDSh3osE4GQ Also, see this blog post: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7899984443/privacy-and-browserid http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7899984443/privacy-and-brow...
wgd 14y ago
I really like the overall result of Persona when used for logging into a web site, but has anyone come up with a good way of integrating Persona login with mobile apps or APIs? I suppose mobile apps would ideally use some sort of Persona login service provided by the underlying OS, and until such a thing exists I guess an app could reimplement all the user-agent logic and load the user's login page in a webview. But I have no idea how at all I would go about designing an API for a website which uses Persona for logins.
- callahad 14y ago
  We don't have a good path for native apps, yet. There have been a few experiments using Persona in native iOS (Pancake) and Android (Soup) environments, and it apparently works great in PhoneGap apps, if you use the ChildBrowser plugin. The bug to watch is this one: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2034 supporting environments without popups will clear the way for good native SDKs.
flashmob 14y ago
Does persona reveal your email address to the website that you login to? OpenID usually doesn't reveal your email address. For example, when logging in to Google via OpenID, google will only send back a unique identifier that means 'yes, the user has a google account' but no other personal information. Yahoo does the same. (of course, it's possible to use OpenID extensions to get a user's email at their discretion) Does persona work in the same way?
- Flimm 14y ago
  Yes, Persona does reveal your email address to the website you log in to. This is considered a feature, because: 1. It prevents lock-in to Persona. (If you want to migrate away from Persona, you can just send the users an email and introduce the new authentication mechanism.) 2. Most websites will need some way to contact the user, and will ask for their email address any way. 3. Users understand the concept of email addresses as identifiers. If you care about keeping your email address private, you can always use the features your email provider offers such as forwarding email addresses.
vivab0rg 14y ago
Just integrated it on a personal Padrino project. Beautifully simple user and developer-side. Congratulations and thanks Mozilla!

194 points by 00joe 14y ago

lukev 14y ago

Other than the benefit of using strong crypto under the hood, I'm not sure what benefits this has over a system like openid. It has about the same level of interactional complexity, and at the additional cost of requiring browser support. If we're going to have browser support anyway, I'd rather just use standard two-way SSL and put the work into developing better UI and private key distribution systems for it. It's even more secure and has a great user experience once you've set up the key in the browser and authorized it to the site.

StavrosK 14y ago
The benefit is orders of magnitude better usability. I couldn't get users to grok OpenID, this just needs an email and password. How will my mom log in to an SSL-certificate-requesting site from another computer?
- lukev 14y ago
  This has pretty much the same end-user experience as OpenID, unless I'm misunderstanding something. The user still has to sign in to the IdP.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    You're underestimating how familiar someone's email address is versus an OpenID URL whose significance the user doesn't know and whose use she can't grasp.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Agreed. URLs as an identifier are completely alien to non-technical folks. Even I think the notion is odd. They just don't make any sense. Plus they are hard to type correctly. Email addresses don't have these problems.
      - reidrac 14y ago
        Although I think you're right, I can't understand why they didn't try to "fix" OpenID and started a new thing instead. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/ That said, I'd love they succeed and we have finally something that works well and it's not under company-X's control.
        fmarier 14y ago
        One of the reasons why we couldn't just "fix" OpenID is that we wanted a scheme that would be privacy-sensitive. With OpenID, the result of the site redirecting you to the IdP (and then the IdP redirecting you back to the site) is that the IdP can get a trail of every website you're trying to log into. That's pretty fundamental to the way OpenID is designed.
  - wmf 14y ago
    In OpenID you have to enter your IDP URL and then optionally sign in to the IDP. In Persona you will just click a button (because your browser knows your IDP) and then optionally sign in to your IDP. A huge difference.
shantanubala 14y ago
Usability involves more than one target audience: it also has to be easy for developers to integrate. BrowserID (Persona) took me minutes to implement. On a non-trivial project, it may take a couple hours. The beauty of this is the fact that it still works without built-in browser support. It's designed to be a forwards-compatible API that only becomes more usable with time. Additionally, email is an excellent way to establish a user's identity, and the fact that it's designed around email makes it easy for a regular person to understand its authentication flow. The problem with SSL is that it is an all-or-nothing technology. There's a chicken and egg problem: people won't make good UI for it until it's widely used, but people won't use it until it has a good UI. Persona provides an implementation of BrowserID that has a decent UI, and the user experience will only get better with time as more people use it. The chicken/egg problem is solved there, but two-way SSL right now is practically unusable for anyone who isn't very familiar with it (most people). Using an email address is very familiar, though.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  I've forgone traditional auth in favor of Persona because there are just too many advantages. The user might already have an account, the flow is very good if they don't, it takes literally three minutes to integrate django-browserid (or whatever it's called now) versus skinning quite a few templates for all the login and reset forms, it saves the user from having to remember yet another password, etc etc. I couldn't be happier with a signin solution. It even complements my legacy solution very well, you can see a demo at http://www.yourpane.com http://www.yourpane.com (click "Persona", never mind the email field.)

StavrosK 14y ago

There was a post about this yesterday, but I'll upvote it because it needs all the exposure it can get.

y0ghur7_xxx 14y ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580986 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580986

jpxxx 14y ago

I can't come up with any reason why this isn't going to be massive. The password problem is the single most frustrating and alienating issue I can think of for normal users.

gambler 14y ago
Two big issues so far: it still uses email for password resets (without alternatives that I know of) and it doesn't work without JavaScript. I hope both of them get addressed.
- fmarier 14y ago
  The fallback identity provider (at login.persona.org) does use email for password resets, but other identity providers will likely use other mechanisms.
  - gambler 14y ago
    I hope so, but why not do the right thing in the default identity provider? Lately, there have been tons of high-profile hacks that boiled down to taking control of victim's email and resetting passwords to other accounts. What's seems to be the best response possible from web developers? Is it: a) Demand that all your users use Gmail with enabled two-factor authentication, then smugly blame them for all security issues if they don't. b) Stop using emails for password resets, since you don't really know how trustworthy your users' email providers are.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Because they just went in beta and there's tons of other stuff to iron out first?
    - Flimm 14y ago
      One of the ways crackers gain access to a user's email is by guessing their password, a simple task when a huge number of users use the same password everywhere. With Persona, only your email provider (and the persona.org fallback) have your password (two passwords in the case of the fallback), hashed or not. If you're already a password ninja and use a different and unpredictable password on every different site without forgetting them, Persona isn't an improvement in security. If you don't, as most users don't, Persona makes authentication more secure and more user-friendly at the same time. With Persona, your weakest point would still be your email provider, which is why it would still be wise to recommend two-factor authentication for your email. If you're already a password ninja and use a different and unpredictable password on every different site without forgetting them, AND you have enabled two-factor authentication with your email provider, Persona IS an improvement in security. This is because, with Persona, having two-factor authentication for your email would automatically mean two-factor authentication for all your websites as well.

Nux 14y ago

How would I log in from a friend's computer with Persona? How about from an Internet cafe; how safe would it be? Persona looks like something that lock's you into a certain device or at least makes it harder to log in on device's that are not your own. I'd rather they made OpenID less scarry (to average Joe) instead.

Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
You really shouldn't login from any non-secure terminal. I have catched even pros doing that mistake with production systems. It's major fail!
- Nux 14y ago
  Major fail or not a good part of the world does not own their own computer.
fmarier 14y ago
Logging into a different device is not a problem, you just get a different certificate in that device's browser and it allows you to login in the same way. When you use a computer that's not your own, Persona keeps the session time very small. Of course, when you're done using that computer, you should ideally clear cookies, just like you would if you used OpenID or Facebook on a shared computer.
ozten 14y ago
Please try this today. It's one main reason The Times uses it on their Crossword product... This is safe on a public computer or shared device, if you logout. Persona also has some UI around public versus personal devices.

eslaught 14y ago

Are there any good descriptions for how Persona works? I can find plenty of developer documentation on this site, but I can't seem to find a good, concise description of what parties are involved and what the protocol is, etc. (Maybe I'm not looking deep enough? Anyway, thanks in advance.)

fmarier 14y ago
This talk gets into how the protocol works without getting too much into the crypto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY
- gambler 14y ago
  I just watched the video. So, apparently, the long-term goal is to have email providers to support this and sign user certificates. I'm still not clear on what information a certificate would contain. More importantly, I really dislike the answer to second question from the audience. Even when the system is fully supported without fallbacks, hacking person's email account will grant the attacker ability to log into all websites as the victim? I already am quite concerned with how much control over everyone's identities services like Gmail have. If I understand it correctly, Persona will give them more direct control over user's identities. It's only decentralized in a sense that different email providers will be able to implement it separately, and verify identities of their users. I hope I'm missing something from the big picture here.
  - inportb 14y ago
    > Even when the system is fully supported without fallbacks, > hacking person's email account will grant the attacker > ability to log into all websites as the victim? With or without Persona/BrowserID, your email account(s) is the key for logging into a whole bunch of other Web services, since it is already used for resetting passwords and such. Persona/BrowserID does not solve this problem. The big picture is that it makes distributed identity easy for the average user to grok.
  - Flimm 14y ago

natch 14y ago

Authentication mechanisms and they way they are implemented can have bleedover into the ability of a user to maintain control of their anonymity and privacy. Has there been any writeup that explains the potential impact of Persona on privacy? Not just the impact when used as intended, but also any unintended effects?

callahad 14y ago
I'm not aware of any standalone articles, but something of that nature would be really fantastic. Such an article would probably be best if written by someone outside of the Persona team.
- ygjb 14y ago
  Just a further comment, anyone interested in writing such an analysis or document should contact us with any questions!
Flimm 14y ago
There's an hour long video discussing the measures taken to protect the user's privacy, given by Ben Adida, one of the developers. It's 12 months old, but I believe the protocol hasn't changed enough to make the information out of date. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDSh3osE4GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDSh3osE4GQ Also, see this blog post: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7899984443/privacy-and-browserid http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7899984443/privacy-and-brow...

wgd 14y ago

I really like the overall result of Persona when used for logging into a web site, but has anyone come up with a good way of integrating Persona login with mobile apps or APIs? I suppose mobile apps would ideally use some sort of Persona login service provided by the underlying OS, and until such a thing exists I guess an app could reimplement all the user-agent logic and load the user's login page in a webview. But I have no idea how at all I would go about designing an API for a website which uses Persona for logins.

callahad 14y ago
We don't have a good path for native apps, yet. There have been a few experiments using Persona in native iOS (Pancake) and Android (Soup) environments, and it apparently works great in PhoneGap apps, if you use the ChildBrowser plugin. The bug to watch is this one: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2034 supporting environments without popups will clear the way for good native SDKs.

flashmob 14y ago

Does persona reveal your email address to the website that you login to? OpenID usually doesn't reveal your email address. For example, when logging in to Google via OpenID, google will only send back a unique identifier that means 'yes, the user has a google account' but no other personal information. Yahoo does the same. (of course, it's possible to use OpenID extensions to get a user's email at their discretion) Does persona work in the same way?

Flimm 14y ago
Yes, Persona does reveal your email address to the website you log in to. This is considered a feature, because: 1. It prevents lock-in to Persona. (If you want to migrate away from Persona, you can just send the users an email and introduce the new authentication mechanism.) 2. Most websites will need some way to contact the user, and will ask for their email address any way. 3. Users understand the concept of email addresses as identifiers. If you care about keeping your email address private, you can always use the features your email provider offers such as forwarding email addresses.

vivab0rg 14y ago

Just integrated it on a personal Padrino project. Beautifully simple user and developer-side. Congratulations and thanks Mozilla!