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This is, essentially, harder to remember passwords.

Probably more secure, provided you don't make a mistake. But also easier to mistake and then lock yourself out. Auditing is also harder, now



No it isn't, because unlike passwords you can reuse a key pair indefinitely without suffering any greater risk.

If we only ever had to remember a handful of passwords you would be right about them being easier, but we have hundreds of them which necessitates a password manager anyway which has all the same manageability problems of the asymmetric key pair without any of the benefits.

> Auditing is also harder, now

Care to elaborate?


You still have to remember what it is that you signed. Unless you are saying it is a challenge/response thing. In which case you have to know what public key they have.

And if it is challenge/response, you need to have different public keys, or a compromised private key is complete game over, just like a shared password.

Thinking on it more, I'm not sure why I think auditing is harder. Is hard regardless, but I don't think this makes it tougher. If you are reusing public keys on N sites, it is now N places to check for use per key. Though, you always had N places to audit. They could be independent without reuse, but still not easy.


> You still have to remember what it is that you signed. Unless you are saying it is a challenge/response thing. In which case you have to know what public key they have.

You say that like it is a problem? Like I said, you could easily and securely get away with a single private key, so there isn't really any guesswork here. Certainly remembering usernames for hundreds of sites would be worse.

And if you want a different key pair for your porn, you can do that and it is on you to remember which one to use, same as usernames and passwords.

> a compromised private key is complete game over

Yeah, just like a compromised password manager is. Can't really do much about that.




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