Paper 2023/1275

Post-Quantum Asynchronous Remote Key Generation for FIDO2 Account Recovery

Abstract

The Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance has developed the widely adopted FIDO2 protocol suite that allows for passwordless online authentication. Cryptographic keys stored on a user's device (e.g. their smartphone) are used as credentials to authenticate to services by performing a challenge-response protocol. Yet, this approach leaves users unable to access their accounts in case their authenticator is lost. The device manufacturer Yubico thus proposed a FIDO2-compliant mechanism that allows to easily create backup authenticators. Frymann et al. (CCS 2020) have first analyzed the cryptographic core of this proposal by introducing the new primitive of Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG) and accompanying security definitions. Later works instantiated ARKG both from classical and post-quantum assumptions (ACNS 2023, EuroS&P 2023). As we will point out in this paper, the security definitions put forward and used in these papers do not adequately capture the desired security requirements in FIDO2-based authentication and recovery. This issue was also identified in independent and concurrent work by Stebila and Wilson (AsiaCCS 2024), who proposed a new framework for the analysis of account recovery mechanisms, along with a secure post-quantum instantiation from KEMs and key-blinding signature schemes. In this work, we propose alternative security definitions for the primitive ARKG when used inside an account recovery mechanism in FIDO2. We give a secure instantiation from KEMs and standard signature schemes, which may in particular provide post-quantum security. Our solution strikes a middle ground between the compact, but (for this particular use case) inadequate security notions put forward by Frymann et al., and the secure, but more involved and highly tailored model introduced by Stebila and Wilson.