Quote from: ebliever on May 17, 2015, 06:11:17 PM

Quote from: edmundedgar on May 17, 2015, 09:26:58 AM

The real-world implementation of the keypairs-instead-of-passwords idea is client-side SSL certificates. The ability to do this has been in servers and browsers since forever.

Unfortunately the user experience has generally been a massive PITA, with the result that they're mostly confined to corporate or government systems where the security-conscious IT Department can mandate their use and the users have to suck it up. A lot of these problems are probably fixable, but as with bitcoin, the UX issues involved in generating keys and storing them securely without bollocksing it up aren't trivial.

There's a good summary here - the comments are worth a read, too.
http://pilif.github.io/2008/05/why-is-nobody-using-ssl-client-certificates/

Thanks, I'll have to dig into this. I figured I wasn't treading new ground, just can't figure out why it should be so difficult.

The depressing thing about this is that the tag (for creating keypairs on the browser and sending the public key to the server) has been around since 1996, but here we are in 2015 and we're still waiting for something without horribly broken usability.

If some smart marketer can turn the whole bitcoin-technology-but-not-bitcoin hype into a way to get this old technology actually usefully adopted that would be a huge win... We should tell people Satoshi invented a basic authentication logout button while we're at it...