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Gotta be honest, the fact that it feels like every website now asks me if I want to set up a passkey makes me thoroughly, deeply, wholly skeptical of this thing.
Passkeys are good if stores locally on the device. However, if used with a password manager the security benefit is lost, and thus actually weaker.
2fa, like Aegis for most people, or better yet Fido key for advanced users?
How do you figure that a passkey in a password manager is weaker? Especially when compared to username/password/2fa all stored in that same password manager?
I’m good.
This seems like one of those tech industry powerplays where they keep telling us what we want instead of giving us what we want.
I would rather have technology that reduces the number of accounts necessary for stuff
It’s called OpenID and has been a thing for almost two decades.
A passkey is a key pair where you keep the private key and give the public one to the service. Then you can log in by proving you have the private key. Fairly simple in theory. Horribly complex in practice.
And what is a private key? How exactly do you “keep” it across multiple devices? It’s all still black magic to me.
Basically, in public key cryptography, you can generate a set of two big numbers that are mathematically related, one called the private key and one called the public key, collectively called a key pair.
Through a lot of fancy math, you, with your private key, can take a number I give you and give me back another number called a signature. I, with your public key, can do even more fancy math to prove that you do, in fact, have the corresponding private key to the public key I have, based on this signature.
If you give me the wrong signature, I can’t trust that you have the private key, and you don’t get authenticated, but if you give me the right signature, I can trust that you’re you, and you get authenticated.
Complex how exactly?
Here, these specs are what they’re based on:
Right but what about it do you think is complex?
A number of things. The key is stored on and accessed by a separate coprocessor from the CPU, so the CPU doesn’t even know the private key. That takes its own protocol, over i2c, usb, Bluetooth, etc. Then the browser has to coordinate that protocol to communicate with the web protocol from the frontend JS. There’s also the concept of server verification, so it’s a more complicated handshake than just one signature going one way. Then, of course, there’s the inherent complexity of public key cryptography in general, but you only need to worry about that if you’re writing it from scratch with no library.
From a basic web dev perspective, it’s not much more complex than a password, but that’s because the complexity of the protocols is hidden behind the libraries. A password actually isn’t complex, even when you remove the libraries.
(The private key does not have to live in a separate coprocessor, but that’s the most secure method, and the one covered by the protocol.)
Doesn’t a normal modern password, hashed, essentielly do the same thing?
No sane service has your actual password.
Granted this was 1999 but I wish I could unsee the shit I saw one day when I did a SELECT password FROM user
No. When you log into a website your password is sent to the server. A passkey is not.
That depends entirely on the service.
Nothing prevents the password from being hashed client-side, only ever sending the hash to the service.
Then that hash is effectively your password
True, but with passkeys they’re never sent, by design.
Yes, kind of. You’re still giving them your password every time you log in. And it’s on them whether they store it hashed or in plain text. With a passkey, you know that even if they’re hacked, they’ll never get your actual private key.
But, if they’re hacked, your key is probably the least of your concerns.
There’s a few differences. One is the length. Another is the randomness. The biggest, though, is that in a passkey, the server is verified as well. That means phishing is nearly impossible.
Client side TLS certs are basically the same stuff and it works nicely. Too bad they didn’t improve on that. My guess is that the big boys want to handle it at application layer.
To me they seem
A More user friendly
B Abstract away the burden of keeping the mTLS synchronized across devices
C Can be used in hardware and software.Feel free to correct me if my assumptions are wrong.
Is your B point properly addressed by Passkeys? With all this talk about export I presume not. Client certs seem abandoned, you can’t use it on mobile.
In theory yes.
Hardware tokens are bound to keys
Software baes tokens can be synced with password managers (3rd or 1st party)And the client cert abandonment problem is an entirely other issue.
Not feeling great about the opening saying keys are necessarily locked to a single device. If that was true, they wouldn’t be in active use.
Obligatory github drama https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
It’s just bullshit that the ‘industry’ is trying to push because ‘security’, catch me dead before I give up access to my private keys to some faceless multibillion corpo
The number of times I’ve seen people link to this thread while completely misunderstanding the context of it drives me nuts. The issue isn’t being able to export keys, it’s that KeepassXC was making it trivial to export keys in plaintext with no user warning/verification, which fundamentally undermines the biggest security advantage of passkeys - phishing resistance. In other words, if users can be easily talked through exporting their keys via a simple in-app flow that gives them no warning about the danger of what they’re doing, then they will do that and be scammed horribly by it.
The person who raised the issue was asking KeepasXC to come up with a better solution for exporting keys - originally he asked them to wait for the now standardized process that every passkey provider uses, but then they settled on showing the user an explicit warning about the danger of plaintext exports in the meantime.
If you choose to read the most hostile and uncharitable subtext into every word a person writes in public, you can misunderstand what he’s saying. Otherwise, this is a pretty cut-and-dry example of a person genuinely trying to support the interests of end users.
He does caveat that statement around 10 minutes into the video. But I still think it can be a useful technology even if it’s not portable since it can ease a typical sign in flow. I don’t think as this stage it’ll fully replace passwords.
Something I’m personally going to avoid as long as I can.
What is the point of having a passkey on OneDrive ?
isn’t the whole point of OneDrive that you can access your files anywhere ?
Am I missing something here ?
“Anywhere you have your password manager” is useful
Oh Dr. Mike, a little more gray at the temples. Why must time pass?
