this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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A rebuttal to an anti-passkey, pro-TOTP post that has made the rounds on Lemmy as well.

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[–] Cricket@lemmy.zip 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hmmm, for someone complaining that another post makes logical leaps, this one has a pretty glaring contradiction that severely undermines their own argument:

The post is predicated on the idea that a feature of WebAuthn called “attestation”, which is only used in high-assurance and usually corporate scenarios, and usually with physical hardware security keys, will be leveraged to hurt people, somehow. The post posits that a website like X will bait and switch users: first, you get a passkey. Then, later, scary “attested” passkeys! This simply isn’t possible to do because attestation isn’t supported on the web for mass market, consumer authentication. Attestation for passkeys (software-based, syncable credentials) is antithetical to their mass market goals, and would freeze out independent, non-corporate-backed credential managers. It’s an explicit non-goal of the designers of passkeys, who work together in a forum anyone can join. And trust me, websites and apps like banks repeatedly asked for attestation at the beginning of the industry’s passkey journey. The platforms, browsers, and credential management apps have held firm that the goal of passkeys is reducing phishing and not some kind of trusted computing scheme. (And I will note: over my dead body!)

In other words, "attestation is bad and everyone is against it, but it's a feature of the standard." What they are really claiming is that there is something that for now is stopping governments and corporations from pushing attestation, but how long will that hold? I didn't have a horse in this race when I first started reading these posts, but this counter-argument is flawed and it makes me lean toward the camp against passkeys.

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

It reminds me of when Netflix was big and I told everyone they'd have commercials eventually. Sure you can still buy a plan without commercials, but I suspect that eventually, when money gets really tight for them, will go away.

Same thing here. Right now passkeys are "open", but who is to say my bank won't require a Apple/Google managed passkey in the future. Hell, I can't run the bank app without running a Apple/Google approved apk.