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For consumer products, a seamless authentication can really boost the usability of the app. In the centralized world, 'Login with Facebook' standardized the login experience. In the decentralized world, more specifically dApps built on EOS blockchain, will Scatter or any other dApp become the defacto login mechanism? Or would each dApp have to generate their own public-private keys for their users like Steem/Steemit?

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  • Please mark this question as completed if you're satisfied with the answer, if not please provide more details.
    – altShiftDev
    Commented May 16, 2018 at 20:24

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dApp's generating their own private keys for each user is not a viable strategy. Users won't want to hold many of the keys as it's stressful and are objectively harder to memorize than a typical username/password combination.

A more likely future to the above - but by no means a good solution - would be for users to generate a new public/private key for all secondary accounts and enter it onto sites like you would using myetherwallet (MEW). The risk would be lower as the secondary account would likely hold no EOS but just act as an account authorizer.

Anyone familiar with IT security should already see the link here between how users will make one account name / password combination and use it across multiple (if not all) sites they use. This is a discouraged practice as one account being hacked compromises all of them but yet users still do so because it's practical.

For the above reasons I hope Scatter (or a competitor to them) will become the standard, we should learn from the early web and make things better, not the same.

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  • Thanks for the detailed answer. I spoke to a developer last week who claimed that EOS gives users a primary and a secondary key. The secondary key can be used to sign transactions on applications on behalf of the users, and so the primary key can be kept safe and need not be revealed to the apps the user signs into. In theory it sounds great, but does this arrangement exist? I have not come across this information anywhere.
    – Able Joseph
    Commented May 17, 2018 at 0:35
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    @AbleJoseph nor have I but it would present some interesting opportunities for user authentication.
    – altShiftDev
    Commented May 17, 2018 at 13:03

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