Technology

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.

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 it undermines or circumvents my fifth amendment right not to testify against myself, then I'm not interested in ending the use of passwords.

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

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.

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.

Just don’t take away passwords + TOTP 2FA for those of us who are actually using it correctly.

seems like too much messing around to make it a widespread solution.

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).

The eco-system lock-in makes this a non-starter for me. If I could store the private keys in something like a keepass vault (or that) and do the authentication magic from that I would consider it.

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.

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.

Better title:

Passkeys: still trying to explain why it's worth the hassle when it isn't

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

No, thanks. I'll keep using password+2FA and I hope that passkeys never become "mandatory".