That guide is great --- really helped me out when I started! Then I realized why no one uses GPG in practice: this stuff is way too hard even for security experts. That's why I believe in making things as easy and usable as possible w/o sacrificing security.
But you already succeeded at sacrificing security, because there is no note about performing key generation not in an internet-connected machine, ideally a live cd / usb image boot.
From the drduh guide:
> It is recommended to generate cryptographic keys and configure YubiKey from a secure operating system and using an ephemeral environment
To the best of my knowledge, if you trust the YubiKey firmware, and assuming that it behaves correctly, the private keys are generated on the YubiKey itself, and cannot be exported.
Also I'd strongly encourage generating encryption subkey in software (offline, air-gapped machine) and then copying it to Yubikeys. If you lose your Yubikey (or mistype 3 times the PIN) you wouldn't be able to decrypt your secret data.
We're aware of hardware vulns like ROCA (we used to check the exact version of the YK, now we support only the major version 5).
We're taking the risk anyway because the benefits of having the private keys generated and stored entirely on the YK is entirely worth it.
We're also not primarily using the YK to encrypt messages. If continuing to decrypt shared messages in the future is critical, I'd personally look into HSMs which offers key-wrapped backup.
"Trust" isn't really that binary. I trust smart cards and key fobs much more with not leaking key material than generating said keys in a safe fashion.
That specific best practice might not be the most important for most people to follow, compared to other things on the list, but it is definitively a good idea and has saved me before. Random number generators on embedded devices aren't always the best.
Oh that's great, alleviates my concerns, which was like, how do you know you're even asking the yubikey to do key generation rather than a malicious actor generating a private key and placing it on the yubikey. Thanks!
I didn't say I distrusted the hardware, I said the very opposite. I said I didn't see how, before this attestation feature, you could guarantee your computer software even asked the hardware to generate the key.
