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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not to mention Apple decided to make passkeys Airdropable. Fun.
I worked on a cool projected called FedID: https://fedid.me/ that creates a distributed identifier (DID) out in the world, federated with AvtivityPub, and gives you a key you can sign in with via OpenID Connect. It allows the DID to have multiple keys for multiple devices, and delegate authority, so losing a device/failure is no big deal.
That being said, Web passkeys can be stored in password managers, just like passwords.
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.
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.