I use Passkeys with Bitwarden in desktop Firefox, but for some reason I can't get them to work in GrapheneOS/Vanadium even though I have Bitwarden set as my password provider
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
282 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
76765 readers
2883 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
All I know is a few months back someone setup a passkey on a shared google account at my job and now nobody but knows what the password for our email is. I can use the passkey to sign in with my phone, but only I can do that.
If you can sign in, you should be able to reset the password.
if it undermines or circumvents my fifth amendment right not to testify against myself, then I'm not interested in ending the use of passwords.
You can set a pin on most passkey devices so that it doesn't serve the authentication without it.
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.
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.
Yeah totally not going to be misused by corporations with proprietary cryptographic-algorithm
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.
I don't want to boot up a fucking android VM to run some login app every time I need to log into an unimportant account that realistically I would have used "el-passwordo" for the password if it let me.
You can use browser extensions, not sure why you'd think you'd have to run an android VM lmfao
I just know the one my employer forces me to use can't be. Need to use the stupid microsoft app.
Then that is not what the article is about..
Not sure if that's actually a "passkey" in the same sense then, MS is doing its own shit for sure. I use vaultwarden/bitwarden and can save standard passkeys there no problem.
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
Tried Passkey in the past. I had many problems, especially could not understand why they must use my google account. Now my google account is gone, don't gonna go that rabbit hole again, i am happy with my Bitwarden and Aegis.
Bitwarden does support access to access keys in (for example) firefox.
I have not tested outside of browser (firefox). So it may depend on if you use chrome or some other app.
Edit: Just got a suggestion inside the Amazon app (Android. Yes, I hate Amazon as well but I got a gift card and I hate it even more to give them a free of charge credit) to add a passkey. So it seems to work (semi-)reliable outside of a browser.
You can now use thirds parties APIs for Passkey. I use ProtonPass on my part, it works great most of the time, but there are still some apps that have Google provider hard-coded.
It seems like the idea behind having the passkeys synced through cloud platforms is to mitigate the device failure risk as much as possible, as any device logged into the cloud account could be used to access the passkey protected accounts. It seems a little short-sighted as it means that the passkeys are limited to AAL2 (as AAL3 requires it to be non-exportable), and depends on the security of the cloud account. The cloud account can't use anything as secure as a passkey, as it would reintroduce the device failure risk (meaning that your security has been downgraded from AAL3 to AAL2 for no reason).
It should also be noted that if the cloud account is not phishing-resistant (which it can't be for reasons stated above), then the accounts protected by passkeys aren't phishing resistant either, as the cloud account could be phished, which would lead to a compromise of the other accounts.
At AAL2 you could also just use a password and OTP, which doesn't have the vendor lock-in problems with cloud synced passkeys and has a wider adoption already.
In my opinion there is no need for cloud syncing, as device failure risk is negligible if you have a backup security key (as the failure rate of a single security key is already extremely low).
Yeah exactly, like make 3 engraved metal plates you can store here and there for recovery, not some stupid cloud account LMAO.
Just don’t take away passwords + TOTP 2FA for those of us who are actually using it correctly.
view more: next ›