linux-credentials / linux-credentials/libwebauthn

How to deal with authenticators with multiple CTAP transports on one physical interface

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#182 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
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Forks
27
Avg merge
4d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Somewhat related to #154 is that if a device supports the CCID/smart-card protocol over USB as well as HID, then it will appear as two devices without a way to deduplicate them[^1].

[^1]: I think this needs CTAP spec changes to make this robust (e.g., returning a random ID from getInfo on every power cycle to identify the same device across transports).

But I think that we can improve this situation by only using physical interface-specific APIs. USB and BLE are fine: we should use libnfc only for the `nfc::is_available()`, or return `false`. (The reason for this is that PC/SC abstracts over physical transports, so we can't know at that level whether it's NFC, USB or a smartcard on some other port.)

- We can still support reading NFC keys with just pcsc, we just won't be able to tell inform the UI that they should say "a USB or NFC security key" rather than just "a USB security key". Similarly, this allows us to use "smart-card only" authenticators, though I don't know if any of those exist.

(I think this issue motivates a change in credentialsd though: instead of selecting transports for security keys, we should just generically show "security key" and preemptively discovery on all available transports. That'll be a separate issue in credentialsd.)

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading issue #154 and tracing the transport-discovery paths for USB, BLE, NFC, and CCID/PC/SC. Check how libnfc and PC/SC are currently used, then determine whether the change can preserve NFC key reading while avoiding transport deduplication errors; completion should include focused tests for the affected discovery behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
linux, rust
Domain
authentication, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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