Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The basic principle still holds: "Kerckhoff's principle is the concept that a cryptographic system should be designed to be secure, even if all its details, except for the key, are publicly known" - which seems to be happening here (caveat emptor, also this should be self-hostable).

In other words, the security still hinges on the secret key, except you're not directly using the password Secr3tKey#website.example, but its hash. If everyone used this, the password strength would still be only dependent on the secret key strength, and wouldn't provide an easier avenue to a preimage (i.e. can't find the key otherwise than bruteforce; even though the explanation has some worrying confusion between hashing and encryption). Fairly straightforward, except some opsec concerns (e.g. "domain name lapses in a few years and Evil Operator starts logging the secret keys", or "site is unavailable for initial load, even though it does work offline afterwards")



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: