On Wed, 2024-07-24 at 01:22 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:

On Tue, 23 Jul 2024, James Bottomley wrote:

quoted

That's not entirely true.  FIDO tokens (the ones Konstantin is
recommending for kernel.org access) are an entire class of devices
that
use hidraw and don't have a kernel driver.  There's an array of
manufacturers producing them, but the CTAP specification and its
conformance is what keeps a single user mode driver (which is now
present as a separate implementation in all web browsers and the
userspace libfido2) for all of them.  

Agreed, but that pretty much underlines my point though.

The ecosystem didn't get shattered as a result of me having created 
hidraw.

Yes, we're in agreement on this.  I was just extrapolating to not every
bypass is inherently evil.

libfido2 is on pretty much everyone's machine now (at least for those
who need it), and people are using that all the time to authenticate
to kernel.org/Google/Okta/whatnot. No workflow got broken in the
process.

Well, there is one use case I can think of that would have the kernel
talking to a fido token (i.e. us having a kernel driver): using it as
the root for trusted and encrypted keys.  It might be very useful for
security features like encrypted device tree or kernel command line
files, or even passing in a private X.509 key to add to the kernel
trusted keyrings or for module signing.   The rush to bypass the kernel
deprived us of thinking about this as an application, but, since the
spec is open, if anyone cares enough, I'm sure it will eventually get
written.

James