This framework contains several sub-packages that you don’t necessarily need. It is highly recommended to install what you need and not the whole framework.

The preferred way to install the library you need is to use composer:

composer require web-auth/webauthn-lib

Hereafter the dependency tree:

• web-auth/webauthn-lib: this is the core library. This package can be used in any PHP project or within any popular framework (Laravel, CakePHP…)

• web-auth/webauthn-symfony-bundle: this is a Symfony bundle that ease the integration of this authentication mechanism in your Symfony project.

The core library also depends on web-auth/cose-lib and web-auth/metadata-service. What are these dependencies?

web-auth/cose-lib contains several cipher algorithms and COSE key support to verify the digital signatures sent by the authenticators during the creation and authentication ceremonies. These algorithms are compliant with the RFC8152. This library can be used by any other PHP projects. At the moment only signature algorithms are available, but it is planned to add encryption algorithms.

web-auth/metadata-service provides classes to support the Fido Alliance Metadata Service. If you plan to use Attestation Statements during the creation ceremony, this service is mandatory. Please note that Attestation Statements decreases the user privacy as they may leak data that allow to identify a specific user. The use of Attestation Statements and this service are generally not recommended unless you REALLY need this information. This library can also be used by any other PHP projects.

Framework and Dependency Sizes

The total size of the core package is approximately 760ko. Hereafter the detail for each component:

• web-auth/cose-lib: 85ko

• web-auth/metadata-service: 81ko

• web-auth/webauthn-lib: 207ko

• web-auth/webauthn-symfony-bundle: 385ko

The total size of the core package + the direct dependencies is approximately 1.7Mo.

Attestation Statement

During the Attestation Ceremony (i.e. the registration of the authenticator), you can ask for the Attestation Statement of the authenticator. The Attestation Statements have one of the following types:

• None (none): no Attestation Statement is provided

• Basic Attestation (basic): Authenticator’s attestation key pair is specific to an authenticator model.

• Surrogate Basic Attestation (or Self Attestation - self): Authenticators that have no specific attestation key use the credential private key to create the attestation signature

• Attestation CA (AttCA): Authenticators are based on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). They can generate multiple attestation identity key pairs (AIK) and requests an Attestation CA to issue an AIK certificate for each.

• Anonymization CA (AnonCA): Authenticators use an Anonymization CA, which dynamically generates per-credential attestation certificates such that the attestation statements presented to Relying Parties do not provide uniquely identifiable information.

• Elliptic Curve based Direct Anonymous Attestation (ECDAA): Authenticator receives direct anonymous attestation (DAA) credentials from a single DAA-Issuer. These DAA credentials are used along with blinding to sign the attested credential data.

Metadata Statement

The Metadata Statements are issued by the manufacturers of the authenticators. These statements contain details about the authenticators (supported algorithms, biometric capabilities...) and all the necessary information to verify the Attestation Statements generated during the attestation ceremony.

There are several possible sources to get these Metadata Statements. The main source is the FIDO Alliance Metadata Service that allows fetching statements on-demand, but some of them may be provided by other means.

The mechanism for generating public key credentials, as well as requesting and generating Authentication assertions, can be extended to suit particular use cases. Each case is addressed by defining a registration extension.

Standard extensions are usually listed in the dedicated IANA Registry available at https://www.iana.org/assignments/webauthn/webauthn.xhtml

Among the available extensions, you have:

• loc: The location registration extension and authentication extension provides the client device's current location to the WebAuthn Relying Party, if supported by the client platform and subject to user consent.

• hmac-secret: This registration extension and authentication extension enables the platform to retrieve a symmetric secret scoped to the credential from the authenticator.

• minPinLength: This registration extension returns the current minimum PIN length value to the Relying Party.

Webauthn is now supported by all main web browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 60+ and Firefox for Android 68+

• Google Chrome 67+

• Microsoft EDGE 18+ and Microsoft EDGE Chromium 79+

• Opera 54+

• Safari 13+ and iOS Safari 13.3+

• Android Browser 76+

For more information and limitation on these browsers, please have a look at the following page: https://caniuse.com/#feat=webauthn

User verification may be instigated through various authorization gesture modalities: a touch plus PIN code, password entry, or biometric recognition (presenting a fingerprint). The intent is to be able to distinguish individual users.

Eligible authenticators are filtered and only capable of satisfying this requirement will interact with the user.

Possible user verification values are:

• required: this value indicates that the application requires user verification for the operation and will fail the operation if the response does not have the UV flag set.

• preferred: this value indicates that the application prefers user verification for the operation if possible, but will not fail the operation if the response does not have the UV flag set.

• discouraged: this value indicates that the application does not want user verification employed during the operation (e.g.,in the interest of minimizing disruption to the user interaction flow).

Public constants are provided by AuthenticatorSelectionCriteria.

• AuthenticatorSelectionCriteria::USER_VERIFICATION_REQUIREMENT_REQUIRED

• AuthenticatorSelectionCriteria::USER_VERIFICATION_REQUIREMENT_PREFERRED

• AuthenticatorSelectionCriteria::USER_VERIFICATION_REQUIREMENT_DISCOURAGED

After the registration of an authenticator, you will get a Public Key Credential Source object. It contains all the credential data needed to perform user authentication and much more.

Each Credential Source is managed using the Public Key Credential Source Repository.

The library does not provide any concrete implementation. It is up to you to create it depending on your application constraints. This only constraint is that your repository class must implement the interface Webauthn\PublicKeyCredentialSourceRepository.

The PublicKeyCredentialSourceRepository interface requires the following methods to be implemented:

• public function findOneByCredentialId(string $publicKeyCredentialId): ?PublicKeyCredentialSource; : thie method retreive a key source object from the credential ID.

• public function findAllForUserEntity(PublicKeyCredentialUserEntity $publicKeyCredentialUserEntity): array;: this method lists all key sources associated to the user entity

• public function saveCredentialSource(PublicKeyCredentialSource $publicKeyCredentialSource): void;: this method saves the key source in your storage (files, database...)

An Authenticator is a cryptographic entity used to generate a public key credential and registered by a Relying Party (i.e. an application). This public key is used to authenticate by potentially verifying a user in the form of an authentication assertion and other data.

Authenticators may have additional features such as PIN code or biometric sensors (fingerprint, facial recognition…) that offer user verification.

Roaming Authenticators

The roaming authenticator may have different forms. The most common form is a USB device the user plugs into its computer. It can be a paired Bluetooth device or a card with NFC capabilities.

Authenticators of this class are removable from, and can "roam" among, client devices.

Platform Authenticators

A platform authenticator is usually not removable from the client device. For example an Android smartphone or a Windows 10 computer with the associated security chips can act as an authenticator.

When receiving a Webauthn Response, the property tokenBinding in the Webauthn\CollectedClientData object has one of the following values:

• null: the token binding is not supported by the browser

• "supported": the browser supports token binding, but no negotiation was performed during the communication

• "present": the browser supports token binding, and it is present in the response. The token binding ID is provided.

This feature is not yet implemented in the library, but you can decide how the library will react in case of the presence of the token binding ID.

The library provides two concrete classes for the moment:

• Webauthn\TokenBinding\IgnoreTokenBindingHandler: the library will ignore the token binding (recommended),

• Webauthn\TokenBinding\TokenBindingNotSupportedHandler: the library will throw an exception if the token binding is present.

You can change this behavior by creating your own implementation. The handler must implement the interface Webauthn\TokenBinding\TokenBindingHandler.

The Relying Party (or rp) corresponds to the application that will ask for the user to interact with the authenticator.

The library provides a simple class to handle the rp information: Webauthn\PublicKeyCredentialRpEntity.

This $rpEntity object will be useful for the next steps.

Relying Party ID

In the example above, we created a simple relying party object with it’s name. The relying party may also have an ID that corresponds to the domain applicable for that rp. By default, the relying party ID is null i.e. the current domain will be used.

It may be useful to specify the rp ID, especially if your application has several sub-domains. The rp ID can be set during the creation of the object as 2nd constructor parameter.

The rp ID shall be the domain of the application without the scheme, userinfo, port, path, user…. IP addresses are not allowed either.

How to determine the Relying Party ID?

The Relying Party ID should be determined depending on the common URLs for your web application.

If the domain is shared between sub-projects, the rp ID should be limited to that sub-projects.

For example, a web site is located at https://(www.)site1.host.com and another at https://(www.)site2.host.com, then the Relying Party IDs should be site1.host.com and site2.host.com respectively. If you set host.com, there is a risk that users from site1.host.com can log in at site2.host.com.

Relying Party Icon

Your application may also have a logo. You can indicate this logo as third argument. Please note that for safety reason this icon is a priori authenticated URL i.e. an image that uses the data scheme.

Webauthn defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users.

This framework contains PHP libraries and Symfony bundle to allow developers to integrate that authentication mechanism into their web applications.

Class, Constant and Property Names

Naming things may be complicated. That’s why the following rule applies on the whole framework: the name of classes, constants and properties are identical to the ones you will find in the specification.

• authenticatorData

• signature

• userHandle

Supported features

• Attestation Types

  • Empty

  • Basic

  • Self

  • Private CA

  • Anonymization CA

  • Elliptic Curve Direct Anonymous Attestation (ECDAA)

• Attestation Formats

  • FIDO U2F

  • Packed

  • TPM

  • Android Key

  • Android Safetynet

  • Apple

• Token Binding support

• Cose Algorithms

  • RS1, RS256, RS384, RS512

  • PS256, PS384, PS512

  • ES256, ES256K, ES384, ES512

  • ED25519

• Extensions

  • Supported (not fully tested)

  • appid extension (compatibility with FIDO U2F authenticator)

Compatible Authenticators

The framework is already compatible with all authenticators except the ones that use ECDAA Attestation format.

The compliance of the framework is ensured by running unit and functional tests during its development.

Support

I bring solutions to your problems and answer your questions.

Contributing

Requests for new features, bug fixed and all other ideas to make this framework useful are welcome.

In the Webauthn context, there are two ceremonies:

• The attestation ceremony: it corresponds to the registration of a new authenticator,

• The assertion ceremony: it is used for the authentication of a user.

For both ceremonies, there are two steps to perform:

1. The creation of options: these options are sent to the authenticator and indicate what to do and how.

2. The response of the authenticator: after the user interacted with the authenticator, the authenticator computes a response that has to be verified.

Depending on the options and the capabilities of the authenticator, the user interaction may differ. It can be a simple touch on a button or a complete authentication using biometric means (PIN code, fingerprint, facial recognition…).

First of all, thank you for contributing.

Bugs or feature requests can be posted online on the GitHub issues section of the project.

Few rules to ease code reviews and merges:

• You MUST run the test suite (see below).

• You MUST write (or update) unit tests when bugs are fixed or features are added.

• You SHOULD write documentation.

We use the following branching workflow:

• Each minor version has a dedicated branch (e.g. v1.1, v1.2, v2.0, v2.1…)

• The default branch is set to the last minor version (e.g. v2.1).

Your PR should NOT be submitted to the master branch but to the last minor version branch or to another minor version in case of bug fix.

Run test suite

• install composer: curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php

• install dependencies: php composer.phar install

• run tests: vendor/bin/phpunit