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.
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.
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.
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.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction
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.
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.
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.
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
Currently I use a FOSS (I think?) password manager, BitWarden, that supports passkeys. I use it across Mac, Windows and Android so I’m while my passkeys are locked yo the password manager, I am not locked to any of the aforementioned megacorps.
While I use and love bitwarden, it’s not exactly foss. Although there is a foss implementation of their server backend
Vaultwarden (the free server implementation) also supports passkeys.
A cursory search lead to this thread from 2024 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/concerns-over-bitwarden-moving-away-from-open-source-what-does-our-future-hold/74800
where an employee stated
I’ll note that policy wise nothing changed. The referenced issue is a packaging bug, but the goal still is the dual licensing model, with the core being open source, and some (mostly enterprise) features being source-available.
Both the client and server are mostly open source. Some server features are paywalled. The alternative Vaultwarden server is fully open source, and much lighter on system resources.
Have there been any recent licensing shenanigans with BitWarden?
I use BitWarden too. OS , device and browser agnostic is a win
But I imagine the vast amount of people will use whatever their platform is pushing, so Apple Google or Microsoft. And in 5 years time “3rd party passkeys” are not “secure enough” and blocked by the OS. (Ok that’s a bit tinfoil hat, but Google’s recent Android app developer verification scheme is fresh in mind)
That’s not the biggest disadvantage “if used properly.” Any account you have should get a passkey on every device you own. Each device has it’s own passkey system. If you have an iPhone, yeah, you get an apple passkey, but then if you have a windows laptop, you have a microsoft passkey, a FLOSS system will have it’s own, and so on. You are already on whatever system would contain the passkey and can easily add different ones each time you get a new device.
The biggest issue is that most people use a small number of devices (including many who use 1). Passkeys work best if you have many devices, so if you lose one, you just use another to access your services. If you have 1, you need to use recovery codes (and people don’t save them).
A key for each service for each device is too impractical in real life.
Getting a new device would mean logging in to hundreds of services to link up the new device. Or somehow keep track of which services have keys with which devices. And signing up to a new service would mean having to remember to generate keys for a a handfull of devices, some of which might not be available at the time (like a desktop computer at home when you are out). Or you risk getting logged out if you loose the one device that had a key for that particular service.
I agree passkeys can make sense with something like BitWarden or KeyPassX. Something that is FOSS, and is OS and device agnostic, and let’s you sync keys across devices. And should have independent backups too. Sync is not backup.
Your password hashes (assuming they even hash them) already live on their servers…
Just don’t take away passwords + TOTP 2FA for those of us who are actually using it correctly.
lets just hold the line of “the answer is always username/password + second factor”.
could be username/password + totp…
could be username/password + passkey…
if someone figures out my password, i dont lose everything…
if someone steals my passkey, i dont lose everything…
even if i do use the same password for everything, the second factor has it covered.
(nobody will ever guess my password of ******** anyway!)
The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa
Most of the sites I’ve seen use it as the single auth source. That said, using multiple forms of authentication in a layered model only improves security.
Personally, I found that It works well with Microsoft, Paypal, Google, Shopify and Proton. I was really surprised to find the option on German government sites, worked there as well. Tested in Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf. The only thing I find dissappointing is adoption
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.
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 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.
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.
You missed some disadvantages. For example the UX and complexity are terrible.
They’re device-bound certificate based authentication with some shiny bits.
Or they’re portable-via-certain-services certificate based authentication with some shiny bits.
Either way they’re new and try explaining that the user needs a new one for every device (or needs a new app to carry them around in) and that if the device dies, or the app dies, they lose it all. I have quite a few people in my life who can’t wrap their heads around using a password manager.
Personally, I find them irritating. My chosen password manager on iPhone doesn’t support them, so I need to have the iOS password vault turned on (yes, this is a dark pattern Apple has created to try to increase adoption of their password vault) to use them. Adoption needs to be much higher, interoperability needs to be better, and they need to put back the hint for which vault to use (which was removed early on to keep Microsoft and google from forcing chrome/edge vaults, but has the actual effect that chrome/edge tend to win the race over other options and means that the passkey prompt might be for a different app than the one that you prefer, leading to further user confusion)
I mean, I wouldn’t mind if I could use my flipper for it, but the big issue is “if flipper break get fucked.” I can back up my .kdbx file in 14 luks encrypted locations, I can’t backup a whole ass flipper as easily.
Nope.
Yeah totally not going to be misused by corporations with proprietary cryptographic-algorithm
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
I’m still annoyed that “OPAQUE” never seemed to catch on. Uses a username/password combo as normal, but never actually sends the password to the server, only a proof of knowledge. Even if the server is hacked and the DB leaked the attackers can’t actually recover anything resembling a password from it, since the server simply never possesses it.
Passkeys are superior (No password at all), if only the UX around them was better.
I’m still mad SQRL never got off the ground. It was smartphone based initially, though they quickly made it work in browser. You had a private key that was ‘you’ and it generated unique user assertion certs per domain, and you completed the login flow by scanning a QR code with the app, which pinged a URL with the user assertion. It was really cool since it had the option of working alongside a password, or you could set it to only work with SQRL logins. No password or anything for the login, just pure math and key material.
But given it put all recovery on the user (if you didn’t back up your shit, it’s fine if you lose it), I can’t say I’m that surprised.
I don’t understand how this is meaningfully different from passkeys?
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 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
