Passkeys are built on the FIDO2 standard (CTAP2 + WebAuthn standards). They remove the shared secret, stop phishing at the source, and make credential-stuffing useless.
But adoption is still low, and interoperability between Apple, Google, and Microsoft isn’t seamless.
I broke down how passkeys work, their strengths, and what’s still missing
You missed some disadvantages. For example the UX and complexity are terrible.
The passkey options I’ve come across so far are as close to push-button as I can imagine.
Do you mean from the developer perspective, like the complexity of the API/workflow?
Perhaps he means the process of setting it up. Or when it doesn’t work. Or when passkeys are lost. Or using another device. A lot of people’s complaints about passkeys aren’t really about when it works.
It’s valid I think, but also some people forget passwords can have similar experiences. For one, there seems to be this idea that if you lose your passkey you get locked out of your account forever. The recovery process should be no different than losing your password.
I could see that. I’ve only found a few in the wild (mostly just enterprise, niche tech-related, and big platform web apps) but there’s probably some clunky implementations out there I haven’t suffered through yet.
For one, there seems to be this idea that if you lose your passkey you get locked out of your account forever.
True, plenty in this thread even. IIRC there’s usually a recovery key process same as a typical authenticator MFA, sometimes other routes in addition like combining multiple other MFAs or recovery contact assignment. Regardless, completely losing PW manager access across devices would presumably be the more immediate crisis for most.
The biggest disadvantage:
Disadvantages of Passkeys
Ecosystem Lock-In – Passkey pairs are synced through each vendor’s respective clouds via end-to-end encryption to facilitate seamless access multiple devices.
More eggs in the American megacorp basket for more people, yay
Currently I use a FOSS (I think?) password manager, BitWarden, that supports passkeys. I use it across Mac, Windows and Android so I’m while my passkeys are locked yo the password manager, I am not locked to any of the aforementioned megacorps.
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I use BitWarden too. OS , device and browser agnostic is a win
But I imagine the vast amount of people will use whatever their platform is pushing, so Apple Google or Microsoft. And in 5 years time “3rd party passkeys” are not “secure enough” and blocked by the OS. (Ok that’s a bit tinfoil hat, but Google’s recent Android app developer verification scheme is fresh in mind)
While I use and love bitwarden, it’s not exactly foss. Although there is a foss implementation of their server backend
Vaultwarden (the free server implementation) also supports passkeys.
A cursory search lead to this thread from 2024 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/concerns-over-bitwarden-moving-away-from-open-source-what-does-our-future-hold/74800
where an employee stated
I’ll note that policy wise nothing changed. The referenced issue is a packaging bug, but the goal still is the dual licensing model, with the core being open source, and some (mostly enterprise) features being source-available.
Both the client and server are mostly open source. Some server features are paywalled. The alternative Vaultwarden server is fully open source, and much lighter on system resources.
Have there been any recent licensing shenanigans with BitWarden?
KeePassXC has begun rollout of their own implementation, and I’m pretty sure they’re considered FOSS.
From a quick scan of the white paper, it appears they’re currently using on-device passkey discovery and otherwise “intercepting” passkey registration workflows, which I take to mean they aren’t originating the request as a passkey registrar. This may be the easiest method to satisfy FIDO’s dID requirements.
Your password hashes (assuming they even hash them) already live on their servers…
Cool, they know the hash to that one service I signed up with them. Not every account ever.
Say you don’t understand passkeys without saying you don’t understand them…
A passkey uses public key cryptography to secure your account instead of a password, it only grants you access to the one account you set it up for, and the account provider only holds your public key, you control the private key. Your passkey is a secure alternative to passwords because you CANNOT reuse it across services, cannot reasonably remember it, and the method of using it isn’t by copying and pasting into a field like a password, so it isn’t susceptible to the same attacks.
If the provider loses your public key, they can’t give you a challenge to verify you have the private key, so you lose access. Just like if they lose your password hash. It’s an identical scenario.
The assumption is that the native passkey manager on the device (iPhone, android, windows) would sync the passkeys (to Apple , Google, Microsoft) for protection against device failure and easy of use across devices. Or you risk loosing your accounts if you loose your device.
That would happen if you store your passwords there too…
If you’re proactive enough with your passwords to manually store them in your own vault, you can be proactive enough to not use the corporate vaults that don’t allow exporting. This isn’t a “downside” of passkeys, it’s a downside of using the built in managers.
Everything you said is correct, but you misunderstood my point. I was referring to the fact that Google/Apple/whatever would hold your private key. In practical terms, it is barely different from the existing “Sign in with Google/Apple/whatever”.
Your passkeys aren’t synced to anything, so the passkey is no different than your password hash. They’re device locked unless you use something like bitwarden, so you’re no more dependent on American mega corps than you are right this second.I’m wrong.
Dont they all sync to the respective cloud services?
iOS vault -> synced apple cloud Android vault -> synced with Google cloud?
Windows Hello -> synced with Microsoft account?And if they’re not synced, that’s even worse. Loose your device and loose your account. Or keep track of which of your 5 devices are have keys for which of your 150 accounts
Well shit, you’re right. I must not have been paying attention when they updated them to include that
That’s not the biggest disadvantage “if used properly.” Any account you have should get a passkey on every device you own. Each device has it’s own passkey system. If you have an iPhone, yeah, you get an apple passkey, but then if you have a windows laptop, you have a microsoft passkey, a FLOSS system will have it’s own, and so on. You are already on whatever system would contain the passkey and can easily add different ones each time you get a new device.
The biggest issue is that most people use a small number of devices (including many who use 1). Passkeys work best if you have many devices, so if you lose one, you just use another to access your services. If you have 1, you need to use recovery codes (and people don’t save them).
A key for each service for each device is too impractical in real life.
Getting a new device would mean logging in to hundreds of services to link up the new device. Or somehow keep track of which services have keys with which devices. And signing up to a new service would mean having to remember to generate keys for a a handfull of devices, some of which might not be available at the time (like a desktop computer at home when you are out). Or you risk getting logged out if you loose the one device that had a key for that particular service.
I agree passkeys can make sense with something like BitWarden or KeyPassX. Something that is FOSS, and is OS and device agnostic, and let’s you sync keys across devices. And should have independent backups too. Sync is not backup.
That hasn’t been true since password managers stored passkeys, which I’ve been doing for years. That objection goes into the trash. 🗑️
This is a big one. Lock-in and the threat of provider blacklisting means it will remain a shortcut like SSO (“sign in with ____”) until we’ve established federated providers.On further reading, this may not be as far off as I thought. Passkey registration providers can be OS-level but browser and password manager based solutions were intended (overview from FIDO alliance). And it looks like KeePassXC has begun rollout of their own. If I’m reading correctly they currently “piggyback” off of an OS-based provider in various ways, so it’s not yet an end-to-end implementation, but these are early days.
And they can be hardware based as well. I have a cheap Yubikey USB dongle, which works as a passkey vault as well. Completely OS independent.
Yeah I have a few of those for the most secure stuff. Hard to beat! The USB-C one is the newest and I debated the choice but damn these days it’s great how it works with everything.
Ok I see a lot if discussion on this topic but no one seems to have mentioned the main feature of the spec that makes them phishing resistant: presence detection. This is what makes FIDO resistant to credential replay. The spec is not perfect but it prevents most common phishing attacks.
Yeah totally not going to be misused by corporations with proprietary cryptographic-algorithm
It’s the never ending battle between what’s secure and what’s practical. In order to have widespread adoption, it has to be easy. In order to be secure it requires layers of complication.
It’s a yin/yang battle.
A bank vault with walls 2 feet thick, 24/7 surveillance and requiring a two key unlock mechanism is secure compared to a house door lock on a regular suburban bungalow, but is it very practical?
The level of digital security generally attainable is limited by how likely someone is to use it.
2FA using keys is the closest I’ve seen to a happy medium, but it has to be implemented correctly. If the private keys are sitting on a cloud server somewhere and it gets hacked, is it more secure? Maybe not.
Just like real defence, the walls are only as good as the foundation or weakest point.
Why do you have the 4-digit PIN? Well, it’s just to unlock the part of your device where the private key is stored.
And there is the problem I have with passkeys. With a password it is me authenticating to the service I’m using. Pretty straight forward (if you ignore the operating system, web browser, network protocols, etc., but that’s part of using the tech).
With passkeys you’ve got this third party storing your keys that increases your attack surface. It could be your web browser, your OS, or some cloud provider that you’re now relying on to keep your data safe. I get that for people whose password is “password123” or who aren’t savvy enough to avoid phishing maybe this helps. But with decent opsec this overly complicates authentication, IMO.
To my point, later in the article:
Securing your cloud account with strong 2FA and activating biometrics is crucial.
What’s that now? The weak point is the user’s ability to implement MFA and biometrics? The same users who couldn’t be bothered to create different passwords for different sites? You see how we’ve just inserted another layer into the authentication process without solving for the major weakness?
With my tinfoil hat on I suspect this push toward passkeys is just another corporate data and/or money grab – snake oil for companies to get their tentacles tighter around your digital existence.
Happy to be proven wrong.
How do you currently store your passwords? I would also consider that a third party with an adittional atack surface if you are considering the passkey location one.
Also your argument
(if you ignore the operating system, web browser, network protocols, etc., but that’s part of using the tech).
is faulty. That is because passkeys exist in part to mitigate those atack vectors. Mitm, a compromised browser or client, etc. is less of an issue with passkeys. The information transmitted during an authentication can not be reused on another authentication attempt.
I don’t agree on passkeys complicating things either. For me the authentication-flow is not more complicated then KeePasses autofill.
Assuming one can be ‘tech savy’ enough to not fall for fishing is bad. There are quite advanced attacks or you might even just be tired one day and do something stupid by accident.
What’s that now? The weak point is the user’s ability to implement MFA and biometrics? The same users who couldn’t be bothered to create different passwords for different sites?
You don’t expext the user to ‘implement’ mfa or biometrics. You expect them to use it. And most places where a novice would store passkeys don’t just expect but enforce it. It is also way simpler to set up biometrics on one device compared to keeping with a good password strategy.
Today we use lots of accounts with unique passwords. Obviously these passwords have to be stored somewhere. So I disagree with you when you say it’s a unique passkey thing.
Passkey has an advantage when it comes to phishing because it doesn’t totally rely on human intelligence or state of mind.
From a personal experience my data was leaked online, not because of phishing or I was careless. but it was leaked from a well known third party site which I used. They were affected by a very serious breach. Many unlike me use the same passwords for their emails and stuffs. But in case of passkeys there isn’t a shared secret. A breach will be useless.
I think you’re making my point. First, you’re right that passkeys can’t be phished. But access to the passkey manager can be. And now you’ve doubled your exposure to leaky third parties, once with the service you’re accessing and another with the passkey manager.
But the third parties actually have no access to your passkeys. The passkey stored are end to end encrypted blobs. So even if anyone gets hold of it, its useless. But a password for instance when leaked from 3rd party can be used easily as the server will have to decrypt the password at one point. So the means to decrypt the password will be at the server but passkeys aren’t like that. The private passkey can be decrypted only on your device for signing the challenge. Basically your exposure was basically halved.
Passkeys can’t be phished.
That’s the main point.
Phishing is a reeeeal pain. And something that needs to be solved. Not through training but with technology.
seems like too much messing around to make it a widespread solution.
Acrually not really.
I do use it with my password manager.
Very convenient.BUT, it’s not hardware based so more suscepticle to attacks.
i see. gotta try it out for myself
I’ve been mostly too lazy to look into how to use passkeys. If my normal flow is using 1password for 2fa (on mobile and on the computer), is there a way I can still use that with passkeys? It says they’re supported but I’m not sure how that’d work, because aren’t they device specific?
I just don’t want me losing access to my phone for whatever reason mean that I lose access to my accounts.
I use Bitwarden and it syncs it all up between devices.
The biggest annoyance is disabling Firefox’s popovers that tend to cover the Bitwarden popovers.
I like passkeys but ONLY as the second factor. Using them as the primary makes no sense in majority of cases.
I store the passkeys in my self hosted vaultwarden, they are a good replacement for auto inserting random passwords via text boxes.
The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa
Personally, I found that It works well with Microsoft, Paypal, Google, Shopify and Proton. I was really surprised to find the option on German government sites, worked there as well. Tested in Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf. The only thing I find dissappointing is adoption
Most of the sites I’ve seen use it as the single auth source. That said, using multiple forms of authentication in a layered model only improves security.
hot take: end users will be more likely to adopt security keys (or device attested passkey which = security key). Physical security, out-of-bounds cryptography to defeat AitM attacks (fake landing pages where six digit codes are stolen and silently used in perpetuity by the bad actor)
source: my job is to try to get end users to put strong MFA on all the things.
Nope.
While the lock-in issue is annoying and a good reason not to adopt these, the device failure issue is a tech killer. Especially when I can use a password manager. This means I can remember two passwords (email and password manager), make them secure, and then always recover all my accounts.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction and I believe the only reason they are being pushed is because security people think they are cool and tech companies would be delighted to lock you into their system.
I’ve found a pretty good use for a passkey. Docusign. About every 3 months I need to docusign something at work. The process involves logging in, changing your password, logging in again, opening the document, logging in to sign, logging in to finish. The only steps you get to skip if there’s more than one document is the initial log on, and changing password. So with a passkey I just touch it a bunch of times and there’s no password change.
Sounds like a password manager would make that way easier. Changing your password would involve a few extra clicks. Also, you might want to check with your IT folks. Asking people to constantly change their password is a good way to weaken password strength. I don’t use docusign, but there is probably a setting that they can change.
Oh, I agree, but I have to argue enough with professionals who know better as it is. I have to do it every day with recent PhDs as a BA who’s been doing the job for 15 years. At this point it’s not my problem if something happens. I have other things that affect me every day to fight about. I’ll just continue cycling through my no repeats after 10 changes, 12 character passwords and using my yubikey for docusign for my own sanity.
sounds like a better solution is don’t use docusign
K, I’ll go tell the CEO that they need to come up with something different.
There’s like a million other free/libre digital document signing platforms out there. Try one that doesn’t suck.
Unfortunately, per the comment you replied to, that isnt under my control.
I use them with bitwarden and a self hosted vaultwarden. If my phone breaks, no issue. If my server breaks, I got local backups… Keys are stored encrypted in a postgres database for which I have access, if I need to restore it. No lock-in issue or risk of loosing access when one or two devices break.
That sounds great, but also isn’t a solution for most people.
True. But most good stuff isn’t a solution for everyone. It takes real effort to escape vendor-lockin. Bigtech made sure of that.
If something is too simple to set up or requires no set up, or comes from a for-profit company, but doesn’t cost anything, then it always suspicious.
I am just saying that the issue is not with passkey itself, but the individual implementations and that google/twitter/etc. is pushed towards regular users.
Critiquing passkey because vendor-lockin is like critiquing HTML for allowing ads.
its being pushed because corporations want to control your passwords with lock-in.
no way i’m using that garbage over my own manager with recallable plaintext passwords.
You can transfer passkeys between platforms? This is a non-issue
all at once? i don’t think so.
even then, corporate apps will always remove convenient features later for lock-in. i don’t fall for this shit anymore.
Cops also love them because they make getting access to your entire phone including all accounts simple as cake if you use fingerprint/faceID to unlock your device.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction
Question is by what? I could see an argument that it is an overcomplication of some ill-defined application of x509 certificates or ssh user keys, but roughly they all are comparable fundamental technologies.
The biggest gripe to me is that they are too fussy about when they are allowed and how they are stored rather than leaving it up to the user. You want to use a passkey to a site that you manually trusted? Tough, not allowed. You want to use against an IP address, even if that IP address has a valid certificate? Tough, not allowed.
They were surpassed by password managers and 2fa.
Password managers are a workaround, and broadly speaking the general system is still weak because password managers have relatively low adoption and plenty of people are walking around with poorly managed credentials. Also doesn’t do anything to mitigate a phishing attack, should the user get fooled they will leak a password they care about.
2FA is broad, but I’m wagering you specifically mean TOTP, numbers that change based on a shared secret. Problems there are: -Transcribing the code is a pain -Password managers mitigate that, but the most commonly ‘default’ password managers (e.g. built into the browser) do nothing for them -Still susceptible to phishing, albeit on a shorter time scale
Pub/priv key based tech is the right approach, but passkey does wrap it up with some obnoxious stuff.
Lack of adoption doesn’t really make password managers a workaround. What’s being worked around? People’s laziness?
Password managers actually do solve the phishing problem to an extent, since if you’re using it properly, you’ll have a unique password for every service, limiting the scope of the problem.
Putting TOTP 2fa codes in your password manager behind the same password as everything else actually destroys any additional security added by 2fa, since it puts you back to a single auth factor.
People’s laziness?
Well yes, that is a huge one. I know people who when faced with Google’s credible password suggestion say “hell no, I could never remember that”, then proceed to use a leet-speak thinking computers can’t guess those because of years of ‘use a special character to make your password secure’. People at work giving their password to someone else to take care of someething because everything else is a pain and the stakes are low to them. People being told their bank is using a new authentication provider and so they log dutifully into the cited ‘auth provider’, because this is the sort of thing that (generally not banks) do to people.
to an extent
Exactly, it mitigates, but still a gap. If they phish for your bank credential, you give them your real bank password. It’s unique, great, but the only thing the attacker wanted was the bank password anyway. If they phish a TOTP, then they have to make sure they use it within a minute, but it can be used.
actually destroys any additional security added by 2fa
From the user perspective that knows they are using machine generated passwords, yes, that setup is redundant. However from the service provider perspective, that has no way of enforcing good password hygiene, then at least gives the service provider control over generating the secret. Sure a ‘we pick the password for the user’ would get to the same end, but no one accepts that.
But this proves that if you are fanatical about MFA, then TOTP doesn’t guarantee it anyway, since the secret can be stuffed into a password manager. Passkey has an ecosystem more affirmatively trying to enforce those MFA principles, even if it is, ultimately, generally in the power of the user to overcome them if they were so empowered (you can restrict to certain vendor keys, but that’s not practical for most scenarios).
My perspective is that MFA is overblown and mostly fixes some specific weaknesses: -“Thing you know” largely sucks as a factor, if I human can know it, then a machine can guess it, and on the service provider there’s so much risk that such a factor can be guessed at a faster rate than you want, despite mitigations. Especially since you generally let a human select the factor in the first place. It helps mitigate the risk of a lost/stolen badge on a door by also requiring a paired code in terms of physical security, but that’s a context where the building operator can reasonably audit attempts at the secret, which is generally not the case for online services as well. So broadly speaking, the additional factor is just trying to mitigate the crappy nature of “thing you know” -“Thing you have” used to be easier to lose track of or get cloned. A magstripe badge gets run through a skimmer, and that gets replicated. A single-purpose security card gets lost and you don’t think about it because you don’t need it for anything else. The “thing you have” nowadays is likely to lock itself and require local unlocking, essentially being the ‘second factor’ enforced client side. Generally Passkey implementations require just that, locally managed ‘second factor’.
So broadly ‘2fa is important’ is mostly ‘passwords are bad’ and to the extent it is important, Passkeys are more likely to enforce it than other approaches anyway.
password managers have relatively low adoption and plenty of people are walking around with poorly managed credentials
All of the modern browsers have built in password managers so I doubt that very much.
Are they as secure as your self-hosted bit warden that is not accessible via the Internet? No.
But it does still keep track of your usernames and even alerts you if you have a breach.
Ok, I’ll concede that Chrome makes Google a relatively more popular password manager than I considered, and it tries to steer users toward generated passwords that are credible. Further by being browser integrated, it mitigates some phishing by declining to autofill with the DNS or TLS situation is inconsistent. However I definitely see people discard the suggestions and choose a word and think ‘leet-speak’ makes it hard (“I could never remember that, I need to pick something I remember”). Using it for passwords still means the weak point is human behavior (in selecting the password, in opting not to reuse the password, and in terms of divulging it to phishing attempt).
If you ascribe to Google password manager being a good solution, it also handles passkeys. That removes the ‘human can divulge the fundamental secret that can be reused’ while taking full advantage of the password manager convenience.
Technically they are the 2fa. The second factor is something you have. I store all my passkeys in my password manager too, so I’m not faulting you, but technically that’s just undoing the second factor, because now my two factors are “two things that are both unlocked by the same one thing I know”. Which is one complicated factor spread across two form fields.
Even if you are really careful, your details can always be leaked from a company server during a breach. If the companies adopt passkeys, that issue isn’t there. Because there isn’t a password anyone can randomly use. That’s why I feel big tech companies are moving towards it.
Companies should already be storing password hashes, so the risk of leaking a hash vs a public key is roughly the same. It’s just that private keys are generally longer than passwords and therefore harder to bruitforce.
Any company storing passwords in a recoverable format deserves to be hacked.
Yes, you have to trust the company storing the passwords.
A good company can store passwords in ways that are secure to most hacking attempts. It isn’t impossible to break the encryption typically used, but it is difficult enough that most thieves will not have the resources or time to make use of the data. They want the low effort password databases, not the difficult and expensive ones.
I came to sorta say this. Regardless of the system if it can fail and if people have to recover an account then phishing will always be a thing. In person options to deal with an account like with bank branches or government offices are the only true way of making things more secure. I sometimes think it would make sense for this. One rare thing I have seen that gives me a bit of hope is the use of in person at the post office for us government accounts. Thats exactly how it should be done. Secretary of state for state and usps for federal. They are the only agencies with enough physical locations.
You can store Passkeys in open source password managers.
I don’t know most of my passwords, so the step to passkeys doesn’t feel like a big one. I also really like the flow of pressing Login; Bitwarden pops up a prompt without me initiating it; I press confirm. Done, logged in, and arguably more secure due to the surrounding phishing and shared secrets benefits.
Sure, they probably work great when you have your *passkey manager on the device, but that’s not when I need to have backup routes into my accounts. When using a new device, or someone else’s, having even a complicated password that can be typed or copied-pasted has way more functionality.
As far a I can tell, using passkeys would only risk locking me out of my accounts. Everyone else is already effectively locked out.
I can access my password manager via the browser from any device.
Can’t you access your password manager from a web browser? Or your phone?
Oops, meant passkey manager, fixed it.
Isn’t that the same thing? All my credentials & passkeys are in the cross-platform password manager available from all my devices & any web browser. Passkeys even have a cross-device flow, so we can just scan a QR code & use a phone to sign into anything.
Manually keying in a password just feels so boomer.
Not at all the same. I can type or dictate my passwords on any device with a keyboard. I am not reliant on an individual device continuing to work. In fact I could get all new devices tomorrow, with no access to any previous device, and log into all my accounts within minutes.
Passkeys do not allow, and specifically prevent, that.
I am not reliant on an individual device continuing to work. In fact I could get all new devices tomorrow, with no access to any previous device, and log into all my accounts within minutes.
Exactly the same with a password manager which stores passkeys. Are you reading before responding?
You could also use dedicated hardware to store your keys. Any FIDO USB key will do. I have a Yubikey that cost me less than 30 bucks.
It’s really handy, because I frequently use someone else’s device for work. All I have to do is plug it in, press the button on the key and enter the master password for the passkey storage. It’s like having a password manager on a USB stick.
I was never prompted to do such a thing. It always just told me to plug in my phone (and even that didn’t work).
Yeah the moods in this thread, like
“[I don’t understand this]!”
“[I don’t trust this]!”
“[It doesn’t fix everything]!”
“[This doesn’t benefit me]!”
“[What’s wrong with old way]!?”
And like, all valid feelings… just the reactions are a bit… intense? Especially considering it’s a beta stage auth option that amounts to a fancy version of the old sec key industry standard, not the mark of the beast.
Because we all know it will eventually go from a “neat” to mandatory with vendor lock-in for no other reason than “fuck you”.
We’ve all seen it a few hundred times now with X, and Y.
I get a few daily pop-ups for “Want to use a pass key”. One from my bank. No I don’t want to link my fingerprint to my bank account especially in a way that will lock me out when I replace my phone.
Remember folks: Biometrics (What you are) is not constitutionally protected but what you know is (for now at least).
You do not need your fingerprint or any other biometric to use a passkey.
You do not lose access to passkeys when you lose your device.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the FIDO2 standard works. It is not designed to be vendor specific and as other people in this thread point out, plenty of open-source secrets managers and hardware implement passkeys.
What we’ve seen is the typical Silicon Valley model of “embrace, extend, extinguish” so you’re right to be wary of any implementation by Google or Microsoft.
Same goes for biometrics - how you unlock the passkey isn’t specified in the standard. It is left up to the implementation. If you don’t want to use biometrics, you don’t have to.
If we cut and run every time a big corporation “embraces” a new standard, just to lessen the pain of the day it’s inevitably “extinguished,“ we’d miss out on quite a lot.
This standard was open from the start. It was ours. Big corps sprinted ahead with commercial development, as they do, but just because they’re first to implement doesn’t mean we throw in the towel.
Also:
- Bio auth isn’t necessary. It’s just how Google/Apple do things on their phones. It’s not part of the FIDO2 standard.
- It works with arbitrary password managers including FLOSS and lots of hardware options.
- Passkeys can sync to arbitrary devices, browsers, device bound sessions, whatever.
Password managers store passkeys. They’re portable and not device-locked. Been using them on Bitwarden for like 2 years now.
It is not portable in the sense that you need bitwarden installed on the device you are trying to connect from.
Passwords can be plain text, which means I can copy, paste, and dictate them to a device that does not have additional software installed.
This is the only accurate take in the whole thread.
Passkeys solve “well, can’t be fished” by introducing 2 new problems and never resolving super prevalent session hijacking. Even as a basic cost-benefit analysis, it’s a net loss to literally everyone.
That’s what I worried, and then especially to computers that age out of updates (2 older MacBooks).
We end up having to reauthenticate on some other device at some point anyway and that means there’s still going to be a weak point.
Like with 2 auth sim jacking.
I think they are being pushed because cool technology on paper. Whenever I read an article about them, I can’t help but think about the human factors. How are passkeys created, often by a password or email. okay… that looks a lot like a password. Oh you lost the passkey, here lets send you one again. It stinks of a second factor without a first. Sure, the passkey itself is hard to compromise, but how about its creation. If your email is compromised I see no difference from passwords or passkeys.
They don’t email you a passkey, what are you even talking about?
The flow I hear about when people talk about passkeys is sign up with email. Code gets sent to email. Code is entered, passkey gets generated. There always seems to be some similar step that looks like that, and often you have new device or reset that looks the same. Sure the passkey itself is secure, but how do you get it, how do you generate it, how do you validate the first time?
None of that is remotely true lol. You don’t get a passkey, you generate. Nothing is “sent” to you at any point in time, it has nothing to do with email.
Instead of saying how it doesn’t work, it’d be more constructive to explain how it does.
Seems a little redundant when the article we’re all commenting on does precisely that.
You mean like… the article you’re commenting on does?
There are quite a few uninformed takes here & the number of upvotes they got for it is stunning. Lemmy. 😞
Lemmy has been very anti passkey at least since it’s rise in 2023, it’s very interesting how tech forward Lemmy generally is and how anti passkey and not even anti, just generally uninformed on them they are.
I for one love them. I always read everyones opinions here and just think nobody has even attempted to use them. It’s very simple.
Better title:
Passkeys: still trying to explain why it’s worth the hassle when it isn’t
There’s a hassle?
Every time I was prompted to use one by plugging my phone in to my computer nothing happened. That was a little over a year ago.
It’s been a very seamless experience with Bitwarden. Pretty much “click passkey, now logged in”.
I mean when I was trying to set one up. I wasn’t ever prompted to use a password manager. It just said to plug my phone into my computer. I did. And it didn’t detect anything. With user experience in setup that poor I don’t trust them yet.
What are using lol? I have never been asked to plug in my phone to a computer. I have use Bitwarden and KeepassXC and also used my phone to scan the QR in chromium browsers for passkeys and it just worked in all the browsers flawlessly (even ungoogled chromium). I just want Linux Distros to allow setup a default password manager for the user and implement passkeys auth mechanism for the apps installed in the device.
I don’t know what to tell you. Multiple sites and services asked if I wanted to set up a passkey, every time I got prompted to plug my phone in via USB, and nothing happened when I did. At no point in the process did it give me a QR code or ask me if I wanted to set one up through a password manager instead of a phone. I didn’t do anything special or incorrect. I followed the normal prompts they gave me.
I haven’t even bothered into understanding what passkeys are (I know, I should check it out thoroughly) but I think that at its core it requires your phone, and as I like messing around with my hardware installing custom roms and rooting I suppose this method will be pursued by Google so, just as NFC payments, I don’t give a single fuck about it 🤣
A better, well defined API for password managers to insert login information to the site compared to text boxes.
Hardly anyone supports it: https://www.passkeys.io/who-supports-passkeys
So to use it I will have to log in with my google/microsoft account everywhere? Thanks but no thanks.
I’ve used it with many sites not on that list. Including this one. It’s not comprehensive.
No, you do not need Microsoft/Google account.
