Regarding Pubkey Enumeration

[Dan Kaminsky]

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 20, 2012, at 4:43 PM, Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Jan 2012, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> 
>> Eh, you wouldn't support a feature that only displayed a password prompt if the username was valid.  Same thing, very similar experience even.
> 
> It isn't the same thing at all. Usernames are short, low-entropy and highly
> common between systems. Public keys are none of these.
> 

HD is raiding authorized_keys files to successfully get around this limitation -- there's a reason we call them public keys.  Also the very fact that public keys are only conditionally common between systems is an issue, as it's strongly deanonymizing nodes.

It's the same UI to type in a password vs. a pass phrase, and we don't bypass the former just because there's no value that could work.  It's odd indeed for public key security to be visibly weaker than password.

> -d