Passkeys are not a trap
scotthelme.co.ukhttps://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406
"The unfortunate piece is that your product choices can have both positive and negative impacts on the ecosystem as a whole. I've already heard rumblings that KeepassXC is likely to be featured in a few industry presentations that highlight security challenges with passkey providers, the need for functional and security certification, and the lack of identifying passkey provider attestation (which would allow RPs to block you, and something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations)."
"This implementation is not spec compliant and has the potential to be blocked by relying parties."
Proponents keep trying to hand wave away the attestation lock-in problem as some vague faraway threat that we may never encounter. It isn't. It's the actual plan.
> I have a sneaky suspicion that some of our failures with various RP's is because they are only accepting certain authenticator GUIDs.
This comment from the KeepassXC maintainer makes me feel like the whole spec is already completely flawed if such a situation is even possible.
Not so easy.
I've worked at places where we use a password manager to manage lots of passwords for random services that we subscribe to. The engineering manager always says "you can put your own passwords in for free" and I say "no thanks, they're going to get hacked" and then six months later... they get hacked.
I use the password manager on my iPhone because it seems pretty secure and it is so miserable to type passwords in on a phone but my other solution for passwords has used cryptographic generation with the database playing only a secondary role and it is fine for passwords but does nothing for passkeys.
most will come with free personal accounts for employees, if they want and choose to set them up. those are separate, and have smooth offboarding for the no-longer-employee.
"free" because im not sure if your employer pays for it or if its like a free benefit to a bussiness licence
- User account with access to the SaaS password manager was compromised.
- User account with access to the SaaS password manager was compromised.
- User account with access to the SaaS password manager was compromised.
- Password safe file (keepass) was compromised/leaked and its (medium-strength) master password was presumably brute-forced.
EDIT forgot one:
- Password manager was used by a user-facing web backend, which unlocked it with an unscoped read-everything master password. Web backend was hacked, predictable consequences ensued.
Ideally you should be isolating your passwords across the company so that one user doesn’t compromise every login, no?
I am not GP. GP said:
> I say "no thanks, they're going to get hacked" and then six months later... they get hacked.
I interpreted that to mean "they (the passwords) were compromised" not necessarily "they (the password vault provider) were compromised".
> you should be isolating your passwords across the company so that one user doesn’t compromise every login, no?
Correct.
(1) The use case I have seen is that a startup or small unit in a big organization has subscriptions to a number of services that are shared by multiple users; if I had to log into one of these things I would log into the password manager and use the username and password that we all share -- these have never been things that I use for my day and day out software development but usually are things the marketing people use that I only have to log into every six months or so if I have to help out with a problem. I've always had individual accounts for bread and butter services such as version control, issue tracking, documentation management and such.
Of course the right thing to do is give members of an organization their own username and password or integrate with the enterprise SSO of that organization... And that's a lot of what I do for work! Many vendors don't support that or jack up prices 10x or more per seat for SSO, so shared username/passwords are widespread.
(2) "they got hacked" means "I read about an incident in the media". Probably some security boundaries were breached and others weren't. I don't think any of these were the worst case scenario of "100% of passwords got leaked". I wasn't personally effected because I didn't take the bait, I either had moved on to another job or somebody else cleaned up any mess so I don't know exactly how my organizations were affected. Still it proved my intuition (gotten from looking at a lot of software and working on user management for numerous web sites, some famous) that these password managers were not paragons of operational excellence.
If I had to trade off the risk of a password manager being hacked versus password re-use, I'm going to strongly recommend to people generally to use a password manager. Yeah there's a lots of "if this, if that"--but that's almost a universally better risk for most people.
There is heaps of context missing from this. Did the password manager itself get hacked, or did an employee leak a password for a single site that didn't use 2FA ?? The former strongly solidifies your point, the latter undermines it, and to be clear I don't think it's a good idea to use an employer sponsored password vault either.
Can you help me figure out some things?
1. One time when I was abroad in Poland, a thief walked into my room at night and stole my wallet, phone, and laptop.
(The thief was eventually caught 6 months later, but that's another story).
Question: what to do in that case if I were using passkeys?
Is there a solution that doesn't require trusting a cloud provider?
2. Currently passkeys are offered as an alternative to passwords. What are the mechanisms that require passwords to be available as well?
I.e. what stops my bank from simply giving me a passkey at a branch and offering no other option?
3. Clouds are currently the easiest way to use passkeys. Last time I checked, you were locked into that cloud, but things move fast.
What ensures the ability to move the keys out of the cloud?
And what do I need to do to have my own "cloud" like that?
4. What protection does the passkey ecosystem offer for physical threat to the user?
With passwords, there's no way for anyone to know which Hacker News accounts are mine, or whether I still have access to them. I don't remember has plausible deniability (who hasn't ever forgotten a password?).
With passkeys, getting detained with your device means surrendering all your passwords, to my understanding.
What am I missing?
Thanks!
The spec requires passwords to still be an option, they say, so there's nothing to see here, move along — and avert their eyes should an inconvenient argument come their way.
Because, see, we all know that specs are ironclad, never change, and are always fully implemented.
Also, putting all your eggs, ahem, passkeys into one cloud basket (as this article recommends) to "move around" is surely the most best solution better than passwords.
Because we can always trust the cloud, right? Not like it's somebody else's computer or anything, that they can instruct to not do what you tell it.
Anyway, none of the passkey lovers ever answered me what to do if my computer and cell phone ever get stolen again when I'm traveling abroad in the Brave New Passkey World.
The best answer I got was carry a yubikey with me at all times.
One more thing to worry about losing, yay. Much convenience, very security, wow.
If there are any new developments on that front, would love to hear them.
On topic, I’m not sure I even trust my own password sanitation, and seeing service A and B hacked every other month, I feel weary. Knowing that someday my passwords might be compromised as well, so what should I do as just a person who can’t remember things? Write them down, I guess.
Which in turn makes it harder to track vs. your /64 which is approximates your old NAT'd public IPv4.
> Thankfully someone with some sense
Cannot be asserted with this:
> I saw that post title and didn't even bother to read it.
Until we change our laws in the US on this front, I will continue to use passwords and hardware keys separate from my phone box.
no thanks, passwords are not a burden to me
If a particular app vendor or website changes how they accept or use Passkeys, then I won't use them for that app or site. If my computing platform vendor(s) make it harder or worse to use Passkeys then I'll bail out
There's a lot of what-ifs in every decision, and I cannot possibly nor would I want to, figure out 82 steps ahead in 4-D chess how company X may try to screw me over
Do passkeys have issues? Sure. Most of them are UX and are being worked on. As a user, I 1000% immediately register a passkey when a site or app offers it as at least on iOS and macOS, it is a superior user experience IMO and more secure. I never worry if I'm getting prompted for a Passkey, am I on the right site?
Also the remote connect functionality of modern browsers and mobile operating systems makes it trival if I need or want to sign into a personal account on my work PC where my personal passwords are not sync'd. Need to get into my personal GMail in an incognito window at work? No problem at all.
Anti-Passkey folks are just people who want to be against something to be against it
Plus, none of the sites that I use passkeys for would I be locked out. They all have account recovery procedures just like if I forgot my password. And, finally, for the important ones like my Google account (where my email lives) I have other non-Apple devices like a Yubikey setup as additional Passkey/FIDO authenticators
Recovery key: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109345
How do you log in without having the passkey?
In theory if I locked down my Apple account with the advanced protection features that are optional, I could lock myself out, but it would be on me to save recovery codes/secondary passkeys/etc during enrollment in those optional configurations
Otherwise, I'd walk into the Apple Store and they'd be able to get me back in my account if I didn't have some alternate method to get in
If it was easy to migrate between services, then i would be a lot more open to using passkeys.
Also, many if not all of the sites I've got passkeys setup with support multiple keys, which I sometimes take advantage of. For example I've got a passkey into my Google account in my Apple account ecosystem but I also have a physical Yubikey setup as a Passkey device, in case I were to get locked out of my Apple account
>I've never actually done it
You can't be serious.
If it's easy, go do it, find out, and come back here to tell us about it.
Yes you do, if you want to claim it's easy.
Otherwise you're just bullshitting.
>I've skimmed over announcements of the feature becoming available in a product or two
See above. That's not equivalent to "it's easy". You don't have the basis to say that.
Now they expect you to always use them to login on all devices.
I had to remove my passkey from one device for these services because i also use a PasswordManager and I do not trust my local chrome installation to just manage my passkey.
I want to have a Password Manager which I need to unlock when I use it. I also want to keep my 2fa and not break it due to passkey usage.
GitHub was also super shitty with it, suddenly a passkey broke my YubiKey login...
On my MacBook with the latest macOS I still can't use them.
I use Brave and 1Password. Clicking the Use Passkey button typically results in some Chrome Bluetooth permission dialog rather than accessing my PassKeys.
I tried to look into this once or twice with no success.
I suspect macOS is at fault. Apple does not seem to care about getting basic functionality right.
To this day Universal Clipboard between the MacBook and my iPhone does not work half of the time.
Do you have bluetooth disabled half of the time?
I believe a reboot sometimes restores functionality.
Also, testing now showed that they connect successfully and copying from the Mac to the phone even works. Just not the other way around.
With that, a hardware issue or connection problems seems to be ruled out.
Apple's software is simply buggy.
One might say "just use a password/credentials manager", but all these passkey prompts don't emphasize that you should use one that is not tied to hardware, or that you should backup your passkey to a thumb drive, or anything like that.
Same reason I hate TOTP that is tied to a device. If you require me to have proprietary 2FA apps on my phone to login to your account, I don't use 2FA. Looking at you, Steam.
> If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that?
Any of them? All of them?
"Starting next year, only Google Authenticator and Google Chome passkeys will be valid for gmail logins. Help us keep your account safe by limiting access so ONLY YOU can read your emails"
"Good news! Your Instagram account is getting safer from hackers and spammers. As of next month, you'll use your Meta Metaverse token for all logins to Instagram, Facebook, Theads and WhatsApp"
Google already forced OAuth2 on Thunderbird [0] and the rest of the email-client universe.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/automatic-conversion-go...
The whole point of OAuth2 is to allow logging in to some untrusted 3rd party site via an authentication provider without having to key your password into the 3rd party site.
a) Local client software like Thunderbird is/must be trusted, it's not a random 3rd party website.
b) App passwords remove the risk of Thunderbird stealing your password, even if for some reason you didn't like typing a password into Thunderbird.
c) Google is both the Authentication Provider and the Resource Server in this example, so it adds zero security.
An app password is basically just an API token, it's up to the backend what powers it grants.
Also, is there a reason Thunderbird or other clients couldn't use OAuth? I'm fairly certain I can login to GMail on Mail.app in macOS and other clients, so they're not using that to lock people into the official app or their browser
I assume Mail.app had to do the same.
OAuth wasn't about lock-in (since any client can support it), it was about getting off shitty legacy auth
You shouldn't need a web browser to read email.
When a website prompts me to set up a passkey, depending on the device I happen to be using at the time it could end up going to Google password manager, Samsung password manager, iCloud Keychain, or Windows somethingorother.
What happens when I go to the same site on a different platform? What if I can't use cross-device authentication because I'm on a locked-down work machine or one that simply doesn't have bluetooth? What if I want to consolidate them all in one platform just for the sake of being organised? What if I lose or simply don't have the device with a certain passkey near me?
I don't have the time or patience to work out any of that, which might absolutely be a 'me' problem, but TOTPs are pretty sodding frictionless in comparison. Scan QR in my chosen manager; type number into website; done. Why are passkeys better?
I think passkeys make a messy credential situation even messier, but make a tidy credential situation even tidier.
Isn't that a single vendor (or two)? How is this not lock-in?
> Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text.
and from another comment by the issue creator:
> I don't quite understand why requiring file protection/encryption can't be a temporary minimum bar here.
They're arguing for storing them in encrypted form. That's very much a different argument than arguing against exporting. I'm not taking any sides here, I just think it's bad to so badly misrepresent people's standpoints.
The complaint wasn't in allowing credentials to move (that is the point of the CXF and CXP work). The complaint was in having sensitive data in a plaintext file live long-term without any protections. That is also why one of Tim's early recommendations was to require encrypting the file via a passphrase.
> Store your data anywhere you like, online or offline. Sync with every major cloud storage provider or your own server over WebDAV or SFTP. Use your Strongbox database with any KeePass compatible client on any platform.
Please explain how self hosting open source software is locking me into a vendor.
If the sky falls and strongbox ceases working with mac/iOS I can use android and linux. Nobody is locking my lockbox.
Not to mention the only way to blacklist a specific app from Passkeys is to use the AAGUID from attestation which means it only applies to attestation. A few pieces of software were providing AAGUIDs by choice even when not attested and Apple helped remind them that the spec says non-attested Passkeys should always just return an Empty UUID (all zeroes) in AAGUID. The people that are going to block non-attested Passkeys might as well block all of them, including Apple consumer Passkeys.
There are an open standard. You just have terrible software.
Saying it's an open standard, and that it's just all the major players I'm forced to interact with that make it suck isn't very helpful. That's like the people that say "Don't like iOS? Build your own successful mobile OS lol"
I’m sorry you have multiple pieces of software that want to be in charge, but aren’t passwords the same? Because Chrome and Firefox both want me to use them for my passwords. It’s not a problem unique to Passkeys.
It’s just everyone ignoring user preferences to try to score stickiness.
Microsoft Authenticator, Bitwarden, 1Password, etc. all support storing passkeys and support multiple hardware platforms.
It's no different than making your own decision on which password manager you want to use.
In my experience, migrating between Apple Passwords and Bitwarden worked without issues, in both directions.
The vendors could use it to enhance lock in, but for the most part the vendors all seem in agreement that the rising tide safety to float all boats of Passkeys is worth investing in making them friendly, especially to non-technical users, and to some extent try to avoid direct lock-in.
The passkey provider vendors are motivated to serve their customer's needs (the end users, and secondarily enterprise deployments) over non-customer needs.
So Apple platform support (for example) will only send an attestation when one is configured via MDM. Your provisioned work device can indicate to work systems that it is in policy.
The compatibility-limiting risk, if it exists, is more likely from regulators putting their hands on the scale and pushing for security policies that would prevent synchronization and backup, and requiring attestations to make sure those policies are in effect.
It also requires foresight if switching. I ran into this with 2FA as well. When I got a new phone, after setup it offered to wipe the old one, I declined. When I went to open my 2FA app for work on the new phone, it needed to be setup. I needed the 2FA on my old phone to login to the portal and setup the new phone. Had I wiped my old phone when prompted, I would have been locked out and on the phone with the help desk. This same scenario can happen with Passkeys.
Not so fast. Migrating passkeys from iOS to Android is possible now; migrating from Android to iOS is still being worked on.
Ricky Mondello's team at Apple created the Passwords app which brought passkeys to iOS, macOS, etc.
The entire presentation is worth watching if you’re interested in passkeys; the the clip below starts at 24:00 mark where they talk about migrating between platforms.
Starting with iOS 26.5, you can choose to move passkeys and passwords
from Apple Passwords to Google Password Manager. However, Android still
needed "a future update" to receive them. That same update is meant to
add transfers from Android back to iPhone [1].
In other words, being able to move passkeys between devices and platforms has always been part of the plan.
[1]: https://youtu.be/yVadD-Lfrfk?t=1454
[2]: https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxf-v1.0-ps-errata-2026030...
If you do not have access to your personal Apple account on your work laptop, you would need to find some other passkey provider with native integration.
Under Settings > Privacy and Security, look to see that Firefox is listed and has access under "Passkeys access for Web Browsers". Unlike a native app which only needs passkeys for its own services, Firefox needs access for every potential service you might hit over the internet.
Then under General -> Autofill and Passwords, you'll see any apps which are registered as system password managers. Unfortunately this is a subset of the ones which register on iOS and I'm not familiar who has done integration yet in their Mac release - Chrome (with GPM) for instance is not listed even though it is available on iOS.
How many people are for now and forever more all in on the Apple ecosystem. You never have to login on another non Apple device ever?
The first two accounts I switched over to passkeys were my Nintendo and Playstation Accounts as it made sign-in much smoother.
I now use passkeys pretty much everywhere I have the option (at least on high value accounts such as Amazon) and I have not once had an issue. Not having to use a TOTP (or worse an SMS or email based one use code/link!) is much nicer in my personal opinion.
Some sites have a much better designed on-boarding process than others I 100% agree there. I find the sites that do a poor job with their passkey enrolment are the same sites that also did a terrible job of 2FA/MFA setup as well though.
One blessing with passkeys is since I set it up for my mother with her Amazon account she has not once had to ask me to help me reset her password. At least once every 6 months I would have to help her sort things our as she would forget it, reset it and then forget what she reset it to and can't reset it again as she hadn't clicked to update the password in her password manager so it had an old or incorrect password, etc. Always a pain to sort out. Not happened once since switching her to a passkey which is wonderful for me.
Also it is essentially impossible for her to use the passkey on a fake site. Multiple times she has fallen for phishing emails with realistic looking site logins and she would just blindly enter her username and password as many elderly people do.
New and interesting ways to get locked out of your system.
"What happens when I go to the same site on a different platform?" = "If you meant device, then Chrome has a feature to allow you to use a different device such as a NFC YubiKey"
"What if I can't use cross-device authentication because I'm on a locked-down work machine or one that simply doesn't have bluetooth?" = "Good, Passkeys are doing their job correctly and you cannot export credentials"
"What if I want to consolidate them all in one platform just for the sake of being organised?" = "Then log in and add more passkeys to things rather than copy-pasting passwords everywhere"
"What if I lose or simply don't have the device with a certain passkey near me?" = "You should have multiple passkey's or use the various cloud versions that exist"
I'm perfectly happy to take responsibility — when using a well-designed system that isn't a massive pain-in-the-arse up front designed for vendor lock-in and to penalize small vendors.
Criticizing the new system isn't avoidance of responsibility, it is demanding a product that is worth using, i.e., NOT designed for the manufacturers to extract more money from us without providing more value or locking in their market position, but designed to be actually useful to the people who will actually use it.
EDIT: add last 8 words
The idea and protocol are pretty solid, though we're back to a "biometrics as password" problem in many device flows, but every time I'm urged by a site to convert to a passkey, I wonder "is this site the sort that would screw this up?"
So far, it's about 30% of sites screwing it up...
I can’t adopt Passkeys if I’m not certain they’re going to work as well as my password manager and Authenticator app, which is to say 100% of the time.
When sites ask to set up passkeys, it’s usually native passkeys (especially on iOS). And figuring out how to get the flow to set up a LastPass key by default seems unusually difficult.
I also use a MacBook, windows desktop, an iPhone and iPad. I use Firefox, edge, brave across these devices.
When I say “passkeys are a trap” they are a usability trap where no one can attest with certainty that I won’t wake up in a painful situation because I decided to adopt passkeys.
Seems that way. Better luck next year, passkey standards(?) people. Hope it’ll be ironed out at some point.
Good tip!
Going to a concert - I'll take my phone but not my YubiKey, etc.pp
And if I enroll 2 YubiKeys, I can deposit one safely at home. I want my phone to be less important, not more important.
Other password managers do, too: https://bitwarden.com/help/auto-fill-ios/#keyboard-autofill
From a user's perspective, if the implementation sucks, the standard sucks.
since the person I responded to couldn't find it, I linked tutorials. it amounts to opening the Settings app, going to "General" and then "AutoFill & Passwords", so it's also not terribly difficult to find compared to other iOS settings.
you could've at least tried to understand what's being talked about before blindly complaining.
LastPass is not a secure place to store your passwords. Bitwarden is the second worst place. Don't just take my word for it, do your own research.
Of course the sites presumably will flip the switch at some dreaded point in the future where you can no longer circumvent them, but at this rate it may take a long time to reach a use by majority of users.
Disable iOS passwords and set lastpass as your only password autofill source. It’s far from difficult. In settings under autofill passwords
"But what if I lose all of my Apple devices in a freak boating accident?" people often ask or something like it. Apple has a procedure for this [1].
You can contact your "recovery contact" (a trusted friend or family member) that can help authenticate you to regain access to your account, especially if you're locked out or forgot your password.
On a new device, you login to your Apple account, make sure iCloud Keychain is enabled, and all of your credentials, including your passkeys, sync to your device.
I get it—not everyone wants or uses iCloud. Apparently, you can use 3rd party password managers like 1Password, Bitwarden, etc. to backup and recover your passkeys to use elsewhere.
Here's a video of an export from 1Password to the Passwords app on an iPhone [2].
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/passwords-devices-iph...
[2]: https://youtube.com/shorts/gJ8BzT73JzY?si=zSY8vp_v297IfCro
I use this across iPhone, MacOS and Windows, and haven't run into any issues.
In fact I quite like having separate passkeys for each manager instead of one password and -maybe- separate TOTPs (usually not) shared between them
If the solution to smooth passkey use is “spend money” why the hell is anyone going to use passkeys over just using passwords for free?
One domain, one account.
To cover that gap, you get rid of passwords altogether, and now users lose access if the passkey fails to sync or isn't available on one of their devices (let's say a Kindle Fire tablet)
Passkeys being bound to the domain is neat, but not without tradeoffs and practical workarounds. At least that can't be the only aspect to look at when making a choice.
I cannot think of any innovation that has required more defensive pleading for people to use it than passkeys. When a HN article has to be titled "passkeys are not a trap", the concept has already lost.
It is why I never use "sign in with <google, meta, apple, whatever>"
As always you are not compelled to that. Lets others enjoy the convenience of passkey.
I do appreciate that passkey adoption has led to wider support for hardware security tokens for sites where I actually care about increased security over password managers, however.
The benefit of a passkey here isn't zero but it's at the minimum.
Meanwhile there are other security benefits as well. With a password, that static credential is transmitted in the handshake. It can be mishandled somewhere in between, and now that entire root credential is potentially compromised. This is just impossible with a passkey. The credential never leaves the client. In some implementations, the credential never leaves a secure enclave, never even entering the client's system memory. You can't say the same for passwords, not even close.
> password doesn't show up you know there's a problem
Here is your contradiction.
The normal person will just assume that some tech isn't working today again.
A key point of passkeys seems to be that it guarantees to the site owner that the user cannot be phished, without having to make assumptions on whether the user is tech-stupid.
If someone only ever saved passwords from the browser UI they really could have no idea how to manually copy a password, while getting along fine.
Well gee how nice for the site owner.
Problem is my priorities are my absolute ability to never lose my most critical assets through some means outside my control, not the site's convenience.
It was ok to use imperfect systems back in the days when the bank and the store and even the government all had a desk a mile away you could go to in person and get anything cleared up and override all possible "usually it works like this" with your physical presense an drivers licence and birth certificate or simply 5 people who all attest they know you.
We no longer have that ultimate backup plan, so really F anyone's attempt to justify basically tricking people into doing something unwise that puts them at actually greater risk because their life is less under their own control, and doing this under the very banner of claiming to care about the users safety!
It's freaking amazing.
In typical scenarios, passkeys offer no advantages over a password manager.
1. In practice everything that saves a passkey requires a biometric to unlock each time, so you SHOULD not be required to use another factor (the secret is “something you have” and the bio is “something you are.” In practice though, now every F—-ing site insists on the damn “we emailed you a code” BS.
2. Passkeys certainly don’t need to be changed every arbitrary period like some idiotic sites (or IT admins) insist for passwords.
3. If one becomes compromised, you can revoke just the one. Unlike a password.
Fairly frequently, I find myself searching for the password manager entry I want, and copying the username or password.
For a while, I was very consistent in trying to fix the URLs for that password manager entry, every time it happened. But when I'm on mobile, sometimes it's just a pain.
There are quite a few scenarios - I'm logging into an app, and it doesn't use a browser window for authentication, but also logs out after a few weeks, I've been redirected to Microsoft or similar for the login, but I haven't added microsoft.com as a URL for my work login, or GitHub (I could be wrong about this example), etc.
When I list them, these reasons seem like I should have solved them already. I used to try to keep my password manager tidy, but when I'm at 674 entries and it's growing faster than I'm cleaning.
I also think Passkeys are a confusing mess, and I don't mind the idea in addition to a password/TOTP option, but definitely not instead. I do like having it as an option for Google, where I have occasionally encountered a scenario where I login from overseas, and can't login despite having everything they can possibly want (username, password, backup email, etc.). I can't remember the exact details now, so I hope I'm not being uncharitable to Google's login/lockout process, but I doubt it!
I don't exactly understand what you mean but it seems more like a problem with the auth token.
For the people already using password managers, it's not a huge step to get a Yubikey and use that for hardware-backed passkeys.
What's the point of a passkey that can technically be exfiltrated off a device it was created on? I thought the whole premise of passkeys is that they can't be copied, and hence can be trusted as much as the device access control. Am I missing something?
I think that is a big step down from the convenience and friction level that the native password managers get you, where you save your password once and for the rest of your life, as long as you maintain fealty to Apple/Google/Microsoft, your password will always be there in autofill.
In my experience this simply didn’t happen. Many sites support passkeys but only the native passkey stored on the current device, but not a hardware security key. Many sites don’t even allow multiple passkeys, which is frankly required if you use hardware security because you will want multiple pieces of hardware in case one is misplaced.
That's a function of your browser, not the site.
Your point about multiple passkeys is valid though. That affects me too. I use multiple hardware keys but cannot enroll many sites because of this.
That's the issue I had with Okta a few years back. I used a password then later added a passkey through Bitwarden on my work laptop. Bitwarden hadn't yet implemented passkeys for mobile.
I went to authenticate through Okta on my work phone. It prompted me for the passkey. Since mobile passkeys didn't exist, I got stonewalled. I had to make a blood sacrifice just to get Okta to allow password access again.
Am I nuts for accessing a site from both my mobile phone as well as from the multiple computers I use?
This also gets super messy when combined with multi-site auth services like id.me where I need to use the same login to access very diverse sites and services from multiple computers (eg, irs.gov, treasurydirect.gov, disburser.treasury.gov).
My general advice for non-technical users that seems to work pretty well is "sign up for new sites with passkeys on your phone" because most non-technical people trust the password manager ecosystem on their phone, have some amount of multi-device sync already established, and the QR code started Bluetooth LE flow on desktop/Windows PCs for sharing passkeys works easiest with phone passkeys.
(I run a tiny site that is Passkey Only for login and it's been interesting providing technical support for it. One of the biggest recurring issues at this point is nothing in the Passkey flows themselves but the fact that the Facebook in app browser does not support Passkeys for a number of presumably security reasons, plus Meta being jerks, and having to remind new users to "Open in External Browser" before signing up/logging in when posting links to the site in Facebook.)
> The idea and protocol are pretty solid, though we're back to a "biometrics as password" problem in many device flows
It's still just biometrics as "device PIN". The crucial difference remains that the biometric data never leaves your device. To support Passkeys the remote website only ever sees your Passkeys' public keys, they never see biometric data, they never have a chance to store biometric data in a database to violate PII/HIPPAA/etc standards when it inevitably leaks to "hackers" (or gets sold to the highest bidder).
To go a step further, "multiple minimum" should be like... 5+. Enough to cover several devices (Laptop, Phone, Desktop) then at least one for backup/disaster-recovery purposes, and some wiggle-room for when replacing an old device with a new one.
[0] https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-...
Netflix is more incentivized to keep people paying subscriptions than they are worried about people sharing passwords or passkeys. No one "needs" Netflix, it's an entertainment service. If they are truly a bad actor with respect to Passkeys then they upset too many consumers and lose a chunk of their audience.
And to add insult to injury, it wasn't even a single factor login the way passkey advocates promise. The site still demanded a normal password to log in! It was actually 3 factor authentication; something I know (the password), something I have (the passkey), something I am (the biometric).
This wasn't some random website that didn't matter made by nobodies. It was a US government website for managing grant money.
We rolled out passkeys a couple of years ago (I work for an auth/CIAM provider). This was before most passkeys were synced (which gives me the heebie jeebies--that's a valuable set of private keys to be shipping around).
We built passkeys to be an alternate login method, not a primary one, for that exact reason.
If I'm logging in to your app or service it's because I want to do something. Throwing up a "hey would you like to setup this complicated auth thing before you're able to do anything else?" Is annoying at best.
Then they normally follow it up with a tutorial that blocks the part of the app you need, and a full screen modal to subscribe to their newsletter, and a cookie dialog asking to let you track them, and a popup asking you to rate them on the app store, and...
Only once I've beaten away all the interruptions am I finally able to use the damn app.
Passkeys provide perfect protection from phishing attacks, since it's impossible to send a passkey to the wrong domain. That's a huge improvement over TOTP.
Re: it being confusing where they're stored, I agree. The solution is to make sure you store your passkeys in your cross-platform password manager. The experience can be confusing though. In Chrome I've found that by default when creating a new Passkey Chrome offers to store it first. But if I click cancel, I'm then given the option to store it in 1Password where I want it.
What do passkeys offer users that rand strong password + password managers don't?
The point is that those attacks would be (nearly) impossible if you have a truly passwordless system.
So if you get sent to goog1e.com, your password manager won't prompt you to enter your Google passwords. Though of course, you could still manually paste it in if you got somehow convinced that it's a legit site.
They have to be transmitted. They (or their hash) have to be stored. And so so many get that wrong.
There is nothing to prevent you from entering your super secure unique password on the wrong site if you get phished.
Passkeys don’t get transmitted. They’re used for cryptographic signing.
Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.
You can’t store a passkey wrong on the server, it’s a unique public key. If your entire database is stolen, it’s useless. No one else can login with your credentials because they don’t have the private key.
Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.
Passwords are fundamentally broken. They cannot be fixed. Cryptography is the solution in passkeys are the implementation.
Save a passkey in Bitwarden, then export your vault as JSON. You'll see a nice plain text JSON block with your passkey that you can print, or backup, or import into whatever replaces Bitwarden.
In theory, if everyone did everything correctly and followed best practices, passwords would work quite well.
Reality shows we are not anywhere near there.
- you can't get phished
- you dont need to worry if your password is securely stored
- Devices support a flow where a QR Code kicks off a Bluetooth LE handshake between two devices to sign a one time Passkey challenge. That can be used for one time login on devices you don't sync your Password Manager to or to help bootstrap additional Passkeys on the new device.
The way passkeys are being pushed is so clearly an attempt to add friction to leaving walled gardens. Stop talking in absolutes in a world of greys.
Don't assume everyone coding a login page is as competent as you though...sadly.
I'm never going to bother with paranoid security inconveniences for the crappy website my local pizza place uses.
While rare, a couple of sites which has many (>1000) users have sent me my password in the plain when I told I forgot them.
Many sites have e-mailed my password in the open when I registered, as well.
I don't defend passkeys here, but too many weak links are present in password based flows today. If someone uses per-site strong passwords, one can contain the leaks, but use the password even once, and the problem grows exponentially.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're doing, this achieves nothing.
Hashing the password on the client side makes the hash the password, and MITM attacks are still possible.
If you are defending against clear text being discoverable, then bcrypt hashing with a unique salt on the client is good enough.
If you are trying to prevent MITM you can combine that salting with public/private key transmission of the bcrypt hash to the backend (effectively the same idea as pass keys without the downsides).
MITM just affects your service, and doesn't always matter depending on what the service is, for example, a recipe manager doesn't need to have bullet proof security.
I don't care if someone gets my password hash. They aren't going to crack it due to the complexity of it.
Here is my hashed password. Good luck:
$argon2id$v=19$m=65536,t=3,p=1$YTE4NzBkMDIwMjRhMGY5NzU4OTc2ZWY5YzI0N2RjOTY$GSBlUwWxr4BBs+5o5Ye2NphT9PFeWx4ECG6siED9uVQ
If you’re storing the hash unencrypted in the DB, and it’s “just” a hash so why not, you’ve gone backwards.
Pass-the-hash has been tried in NTLMv1 and thankfully that was the end of that failed experiment.
Modern password authentication is performed by the client sending a plaintext password encapsulated within a symmetrically-encrypted tunnel. On the Web that's with TLS. The server then uses bcrypt or another scheme to hash the password (along with the stored salt) and compared that resulting hash with the value in the table.
How do you know the hashed value stored in the database is the same hashed value the user submitted? Server side I can add a salt and hash more before storing or comparing.
Please explain how authentication would occur without a comparison between the user's submission and a value stored at creation/update of the passphrase.
You are supposed to send the password, via TLS so it's not in the clear, to the server to be hashed.
If you hash on the client... then the hash essentially becomes the password, and defeats the purpose of a hash. I could just steal the hash and use it.
The name of this vulnerability is "pass the hash"
Client:
C = SHA256(password)
Server:
V = Argon2id(C, server_salt)
Database:
stores V and server_saltYou replied to someone talking about password managers, which objectively do exactly that.
> Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.
And Passkeys don't offer portability, user choice, or user control.
Cryptography may be a solution, passkeys are one technical implementation that at is core is designed around smartphone-first, vendor-first, brand-loyality-first thinking.
password managers do not do that. open up your password manager, press "copy" on the password, and then paste it into a random website. it will paste it.
(i think 1password just recently enabled an option that will warn you if the website is different than the one it has, but it still lets you paste it)
It is a pretty big red-flag.
right. and in an office setting, bob in accounting will go "weird, autofill isnt working, ill copy/paste it".
that is not a possibility with a passkey.
This is where Passkeys shine, in an edge-case user that is neither of the two most common user types. Basically a unicorn situation.
you must not work in regular corporate environments. this happens all the time.
yes, they know how to hit the big "copy" button but don't know how to debug an extension.
take a year or two to work security (or general IT support) in a non-tech-company corporate environment, and get ready to have your socks blown off. people become exceptionally literate with things they interact with all day (excel is great example of this) yet have no idea that google.example.com isn't an official google website.
Copy and paste is not a skill that requires much technical literacy. I've not seen a Password Manager that makes the copy button hidden or hard to find or need much technical skill to use.
Many "legitimate" websites, especially corporate "SSO", accidentally train users that autofill just doesn't work some of the time. Example Corporation's SSO configuration generally has users put their password into auth.example.com, except when the app in question is using some weird SAML flow and accidentally ends up at saml.example.com or auth.okta.com. An old legacy internal app still needs the password inputted in an HTML Basic Auth prompt due to a redirect through oldauth.example.com. The user learns to just copy and paste and have no idea why autofill works on some internal apps and not others because they have no idea what SAML is or why a legacy app is special/different from modern ones.
It happens on the public web, too, to a lesser extent. A website goes through a "rearranging deck chairs phase" and can't decide if id.example.com is cooler than auth.example.com or if they should just put login only on top level example.com and flip back and forth over a few weeks as different internal teams "win" or various A/B tests run.
You can not use a passkey on the wrong site. Period. They’re unphishable.
Short of somehow talking a user through finding the full private key and getting them to send that to you, there is no way to trick a user into giving you what you need to get into a website impersonating them.
That’s absolutely not true with a password manager. They may TRY to prevent you from ACCIDENTALLY entering it on a website, but they don’t stop you.
So you're telling me they're phishable?
This is objectively false. Every major platform provides user choice in Passkey Manager. It's the same flow/settings to setting up a third party Password Manager.
All of the ecosystems have defaults that include some amount of portability: iOS defaults to Passkeys synced through iCloud Password Manager and backed up/restored with device backups. Android defaults to Passkeys synced through Chrome Password Manager. Windows defaults to Passkeys synced through Edge Password Manager. All of the ecosystems have plugin systems to support third party Password/Passkey Managers such as 1Password or Bitwarden.
Most devices that support Passkeys support a QR code bootstrapped flow for cross-device/cross-ecosystem Passkey challenge signing via Bluetooth LE.
Most ecosystems deliberately don't provide explicit private import/export to help protect users, but that's more an implementation detail than a technical requirement, and mostly not an implementation detail for "lock in" reasons but for simple security reasons: the private key you cannot export is the private key that is harder to steal by bad actors. The private key that you cannot manually import is the private key that can't be installed by bad actors.
Everyone knows to hash passwords now and browsers basically enforce SSL. This is not a practical differentiator.
>Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.
They are still susceptible to malicious enrollment. If a user is convinced a fake site is real, to the point that they are opening their password manager to copy the password to it, you should assume they will do the equivalent with a passkey (re-enroll attacker's key or register attacker's passkey).
>If your entire database is stolen, it’s useless.
As are databases containing strong randomly generated password hashes. What is your threat model here, they somehow forgot to hash their passwords yet they are still hashing session tokens, storing customer data in completely separate databases, safely storing private keys, etc.? It requires quite the strawman scenario to apply.
got a good chuckle out of me. your optimism is inspiring.
I'm sure that there are big enough fools out there, I'm just thinking there might be signs they are doing something wrong in that case.
Can you walk me through how that would work?
Attacks on passkeys have been because of flaws in the OS, or the browser, or the password manager, but none of those things are going away any time soon. Passkeys depend on those things, which means they aren't are solution to the problem of phishing. They just make phishing harder.
Passkeys also make things harder for the legitimate user though, and there's a very real question of whether the protection they offer is worth the trouble.
It’s not a new vulnerability. It’s not a reason to roll out Passkeys unless it’s also a reason to get rid of passwords.
With Passkeys you’re still net ahead.
> Depending on which multi factor method the account uses, the victim sees a matching fake screen, whether a one time code prompt, an authenticator app number match, or an SMS page.
The only sense in which passkeys have anything to do with this at all is that the attackers used the word "passkey" in their emails. When a phishing campaign with the subject line "Your Mailbox is Full, Log In to Fix Now!" succeeds, that does not demonstrate an interesting vulnerability inherent to your mail server's mailbox size limits.
That's wrong. They attackers actually go on to create a real passkey that gives their device access to the compromised account.
Accounts that are already protected by passkeys can still be vulnerable too. see:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/08/28/yes-your-...
https://www.esentire.com/blog/securing-passkeys-thwarting-au...
https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/passwordless-authenticat...
The other articles you've linked also describe attacks against accounts that allow non-passkey logins, or attacks that require a compromised browser.
The point is that passkeys significantly reduce the attack surface.
In any case, if you can get the user on the phone and convince them to let you walk them through a bespoke auth flow, I doubt there is any auth mechanism that would stop this. This is why every auth system these days is constantly telling you "We'll never ask for X", because at that point, the game is over.
Exactly. Passkeys can't solve the problem of phishing. At best it only makes it more difficult. Phishing is less of a concern to me personally than losing my access to my account because of the complexity and fragility of passkeys. I've read enough horror stories, even from very capable people, about people who were screwed because they thought they were doing the right thing by setting up passkeys. Passkeys sound like they might be great for many other people. My vulnerability to phishing doesn't justify the risk of passkeys.
This is only technically true because of the definition of what a passkey is is vague.
Hardware Attestation solves this problem and is "good actually". The issue with attestation is when site attempt to restrict which enclaves/sources can register keys. But if you don't restrict who/what can register keys, attestation is super useful for preventing this exact issue.
When you register your key initially you establish your hardware attestation parameters. The attacker cannot know those parameters unless they were the ones to initially register you for the site as the public attestation signature is unique per-key and the private one per-use with the public one verifying the private one.
So if you have remote attestation you can verify whether the source presenting the signature for auth is the same source that created the signature and trivially block MITM attacks. Likewise for more complicated custody/proxy chains.
This just by itself largely solves MITM key re-enrollment attacks but tech camps that support passkeys either ideologically oppose attestation (due to understandable enclosure fears) or enforce hardware attestation for enclosure purposes without bothering to address MITM/signature origin checks.
Only in theory. Suppose you are a bank, which enclaves/sources/devices do you support vs. not support? What do you do for users on a desktop PC that don't have an enclave? Phishing sites will leverage your weakest enrollment option.
Software passkeys can be stolen if the client is compromised but they aren't vulnerable to MITM or phishing as long as attestation is used.
> which enclaves/sources/devices do you support vs. not support?
You support all of them and prefer the strongest configuration for the source available.
If you've registered a hardware based key with attestation and then an attack tries to intercept that via phishing or MITM, the key already has its capabilities established and if you try to use the key without attest it should fail.
If you register a key without attestation support then you may be vulnerable to MITM or phishing but you can't intercept a user/their passkey with a stronger set of capabilities and downgrade them.
Are you really going to block that cred reset on the grounds that it's a downgrade? You're going to have a lot of users calling your support asking why they can't login after switching devices.
So you allow it, then oops it was not a laptop, it was a phishing site.
That's not the argument being made.
The argument I'm making is that the only MITM/phishing vulnerability is in the initial passkey registration and not in the auth.
So once you have a passkey and the flow supports attestation, as long as you use the passkey you are effectively immune to MITM and phishing.
Now if you input a password or recovery code or whatever and use that to register a new passkey that's initial passkey registration again and not MITM or phishing of the passkey itself. The reason this matters is because you can register as many passkeys as you want. Say you sign up and log in on your phone. Now you register a passkey on the phone. You want to log in on your laptop, use the key from your phone to log in and register one for the laptop as well. Now you lose your phone or your laptop, you use the other to log you in and set up a new passkey for that device.
Once that initial passkey was registered the auth process is pretty watertight and each device you regularly use gets a new key after auth so you generally always have at least one device that you can use to get into your others.
Now of course if you only have one device and it gets destroyed or if all your devices are destroyed in a fire or flood or whatever then you have to go through the untrusted reset/re-registration flow but in all other scenarios you always default to the passkey-based "use another device you own" methods to register new keys.
TLDR: the point is that you very rarely ever do a true cred reset. The flow itself incentivizes multiple passkey auth methods such that bootstrapping new keys from an untrusted environment is rarely if ever required. This works best for "core services" like your email/google acct/apple acct/microsoft acct where you are generally expected to want access to them anywhere you do stuff so the passkey flow is best pared with SSO to increase the odds you've used the acct on at least one other device.
Phishing sites already frequently target the reset/create-new-password path because it's actually easier to get a user to generate a new password vs. trick their password manager. Plus 2FA is usually required anyway since no 'remember me' cookie is avail so a password reset is equal in difficulty to a password login.
That method still works just fine with passkeys right?
The key problem is that sites have made users so used to having to generate a new password/credential that they think nothing of it. It's something you just do every few months for most websites esp. secure websites like banks. Even on the same device users are being trained to generate multiple passkeys, one for chrome, one for safari/apple, how about a third for the phishing site.
Kind of? But it really depends and there's a lot of edge cases the phishing website would have to dodge to avoid breaking the custody chain.
If you force the user down to "use your password/security questions/whatever" to auth and create a new key then yes phishing is still viable here but one of the key advantages of pushing for a passkeys-first approach is that you can make the other auth methods harder. i.e. mandate password + 2FA as a strictly backup method instead.
> The key problem is that sites have made users so used to having to generate a new password/credential that they think nothing of it. It's something you just do every few months for most websites esp. secure websites like banks.
Yep and passkeys explicitly exist to eliminate this behavior.
> Even on the same device users are being trained to generate multiple passkeys, one for chrome, one for safari/apple, how about a third for the phishing site.
Well here the caveat is that the phishing website would have to force the user back down to password-auth or security questions or whatever other "weak" method and then use that to create a passkey but not have perms to do anything else.
Now if the phishing site tries to MITM the actual passkey registration flow there are a lot of ways to detect a phishing attempt and terminate the registration and alert the user through alternate contact methods.
TLDR: there are probably still ways to execute a phishing attack but to succeed they have to be far more sophisticated and there's countless ways to accidentally break the passkey auth chain in a way that halts the attack.
It seems like one of those things that only works if you're sticking to one ecosystem.
If the developer fucks up the website/app, that is their fault and not a failure of the technology.
What is the mechanism to do this? As I understand it, the passkey is basically a public/private key pair. You'd have to download the attacker's key pair into your passkey system? What passkey system allows you to provide a key pair, rather than always generating one? I'd like to see a step-by-step walkthrough that doesn't involve a straightforward phishing scenario, or running privileged commands on the users computer (if you can do that, all bets are off.)
What do you image happens with passkeys?
> They (or their hash) have to be stored.
What do you image happens with passkeys?
> If your entire database is stolen, it’s useless. No one else can login with your credentials because they don’t have the private key.
From the consumer, do you imagine a hacker has my key to unlock my password database?
From a service provider, do you imagine they are not using encryption at rest?
> Cryptography is the solution in passkeys are the implementation.
Do you imagine cryptography is not used with passwords?
And for that reason, the server does not have the secret. It only has the public key, which is useless on its own. So it can be stored in the database in plain text unencrypted. And you’re not really taking any risk.
Passwords are not cryptography. People may use cryptography to store them at rest, or their hash. But the true password still has to be transmitted. The first time, and every time.
The password never has to be transferred. In fact never having the password should be the goal. Not even a first time. Don't let the password leave their device. You transmit the hash.
All that you gain by transmitting the hash, is that the attacker will need to modify the client's request to inject the stolen hash.
If the client (website or app) runs on the attacker's own devices, this is trivial. I suppose it is a valid obstacle if we are talking about an ATM or similar locked-down client.
Proof needed.
> How many phishing emails h
The point is the average Joe will not be phished - especially important stuff - like email or eBay or bank. That is the reason for passkey.
Yes, many people in HN can avoid scammers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/08/28/yes-your-...
https://www.howtogeek.com/passkeys-were-supposed-to-be-more-...
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/08/googles-synch...
https://cybernews.com/security/google-passkeys-vulnerability...
https://cybersecuritynews.com/passkeys-via-aitm-phishing-att...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/your-passkeys-could-be-vulnera...
Typically the user gives a website their public passkey, which does not need to be kept secret since it’s public. If the website is hacked the attackers only get information that is already public.
You seem to be talking about a scenario where a user’s private keychain on their computer is compromised and the attacker is able to access other systems from that same machine without the user’s knowledge. (Note that the keychain data is itself encrypted so can’t be used from a different computer.)
It's not just the end user that you have to worry about, attacks are helped by the fact that websites suck at passkeys too
"...we developed PASSKEYS-ATTACKER. The tool allows for precise manipulation of WebAuthn messages at every step of the protocol and integrates 15 attack types of which 10 were not covered in previous work. Among them, 2 attack types have critical CVSS scores. We discovered them on 18 out of 103 evaluated websites. These attacks take over user accounts, delete their passkeys, or lock them out of their accounts. Nearly half of the tested sites (53) were vulnerable to at least one attack with a high CVSS score, exposing users to threats such as phishing and session fixation." https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentat...
But that is not a flaw in passkeys. And there have been bugs in password managers that expose standard passwords as well.
By that reasoning passwords are 100% secure too, it's the human's fault when they fall for phishing sites! Passkeys depend on humans, password managers, devices, certificate authorities, browsers, and operating systems. That's not even including the implementation itself (https://www.esentire.com/blog/securing-passkeys-thwarting-au...)
All of this means that even when you're using a passkey an attacker could still break into your accounts. Passkeys can make it harder for them, but it can make it harder for you to get access to your accounts too. For me, I don't think the risk of phishing is worth the trouble passkeys would cause me.
You need to migrate from one login domain to another (rebranding, change of login providers...) and none of your customer credentials will carry over.
Your password might not be stored anywhere except in your head.
Your local storage gets compromised and your passkeys are there for the taking (password in your head isn't).
"Cloud" password managers who hold your passkey private key part is exactly like them having your password and are worse than websites having proper cryptographic hash of your password: they might not be e2e encrypting it (you were comparing with sites doing password hashing wrong too), so a breach exposes all your passkeys just the same.
My point is that there is no panacea. Passkeys are like SSH keys for the web. I still put a passphrase on my SSH keys. Do you?
Wow, you sound like you know what you're talking about.
> They have to be transmitted. They (or their hash) have to be stored. And so so many get that wrong.
Ok, you've stopped sounding like you know what you're talking about.
Passwords have to be transmitted or stored. They don't have to be transmitted and stored. As you note, we usually opt for transmission but not storage. You could do it the other way around.
> There is nothing to prevent you from entering your super secure unique password on the wrong site if you get phished.
> Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.
They can still be entered. Not working isn't the same thing as not being sent. A cryptographic exchange should hopefully fail before anyone who's pretending to be the counterparty you want learns enough to impersonate you. But you can enter anything anywhere.
> Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.
Unique strong passwords offer the following:
1(a). They are never transmitted (well, once), and provide phishing resistance; or
1(b). They are never stored, and provide leak resistance.
2. In the event of compromise, no other credentials of yours are simultaneously compromised.
It's true that it would be nice to enjoy phishing resistance and leak resistance.
Here are some other things unique strong passwords offer:
3. You are free to establish any relationship you like, with anyone you like. You don't need permission from Yubico to create an account somewhere.
4. Yubico can't pretend to be you.
You might notice that passkeys don't offer any of those. Your comment appears to enthusiastically endorse the idea that passkeys are a trap.
> Passwords are fundamentally broken. They cannot be fixed.
This is the "PGP is fundamentally broken" argument again. It will never be valid.
If you ask any followup questions, the reason that "PGP is fundamentally broken" is that people use Outlook plugins, and those plugins mean that they're constantly sending email in plaintext when they should have sent it encrypted. There's a very, very simple solution to this.
Don't use Outlook plugins. Run PGP yourself.
Before you send your email, check whether it looks more like "OK, everyone's ready for the kidnapping on Thursday" or "Eb+h+Q1iDEYUgJlO5GTtmcibC+D1E9oJWvZeoy9I2tpqxe9j/iokAx0R". You will be able to tell the difference. Nobody has ever failed at telling these apart.
If you were about to send the email, but it's still in plaintext, don't send it.
Passwords are no more fundamentally broken than PGP is.
Replying only to this part, using a password manager with autofill solves this problem. The password manager (I use Bitwarden, but there are others) can check the site you're trying to log in to, and only autofill passwords that are for that site. I don't have to do any work to differentiate example.com from thisisexample.com, because Bitwarden will only show me the example.com password.
But in my opinion, the solutions that passkeys provide come with the costs that are being discussed here, and I haven't found the trade-off worthwhile.
Wrong question.
Users don't use good passwords or even password managers. Users reuse passwords.
If it gets lost for whatever reason, I don't care, I will login again with regular username/password.
So as long as you also have a regular username/password login, phone passkeys are great time savers.
If machines, browsers, phones etc are set up properly (yes, I know, big ask, especially with the confusion surrounding this, so I acknowledge the caveat), then the vast majority of passkey requests will go right into the preferred method (i.e. 1Password, Bitwarden, even Apple, browser of choice, etc). And most of those now will allow that passkey then to be used on a different device if signed in and synced.
I have found it to work pretty well with a password manager. I would suspect OS level passkeys would be much less "portable", especially across different manufacturer devices, like Mac/Windows, or even Windows/Android, etc. Which is why I waited to start using passkeys until I could use a password manager to store them, and I turned off all other passkey storages (same as I did for password storage before).
If we don't add decent sharing to passkeys then people will continue to use passwords, which is worse for security than adding a properly designed sharing feature for passkeys.
At least there's a dedicated migration protocol for passkeys, but I'm not super stoked about how basic Apple's password management is, and how few fields there are for each profile.
But I also feel like it's time to retire my YubiKeys ...
(For example, it only stores the passwords in memory and never persists them locally in any form, because there's no way to secure that, so it has to redownload them from scratch every time you open the app. It also only supports proper Windows Hello PINs rather than normal account passwords, because that's the only way to get proper hardware backed cryptography locked behind authentication, etc. It's a mess)
Why, specifically?
Anything that randomly makes a Windows 8-style popup offer to keep my login credentials safe makes me want to run farrrrr away.
The vibe of the original criticism, even with its technical flaws was this: are passkeys - as a standard, and a user interface - vulnerable to corporate capture? I think passkey defenders are focusing far more on the theoretical technical superiority, and ignoring how instinctively alarming the average implementation is.
We face a lot a lot of attempts to capture our data, and passkey feels like a new frontier.
For me, I know exactly where I am with my password manager & TOTP. I think the current confusing interface of passkeys will make me less secure rather than more, so I've not invested the time to think about how to use them.
Lets give the guys at the Home Depot all the keys to our super secure house locks. Any time you want to get in, just roll down to one of 5 convenient locations, authenticate with the HD, and they will issue you a one time entrance pass to the house. Easy.
Bullshit.
Then the user still controls the passkey using a password and then everything else flows from that.
Passkeys largely meet 2FA requirements by themselves because they are "something you have" (its stored on a device you own) and require "something you know" (device PIN) or "something you are" (biometric unlock) to use.
Meta's implementation by contrast is bad, in my opinion. You are only allowed one passkey (so one login ecosystem/hardware key allowed) and it completely bypasses 2fa and security tokens. So, someone looking for more security must avoid passkeys "altogeher" and use password + U2f security key and the passkey only being allowed in a single ecosystem means that password/phishing lanes must remain open. All you're doing is disabling 2fa on a key that is likely sync'd to all of your devices. All that said...it may still be a security improvement for most users in the real world in practice, I just find it a very annoying and confusing set of security decisions.
Heck, as an engineer even I don't get them. What ever happened to password + yubikey?
TOTP is already 'good'. Passkeys are worse because of bullshit like this.
In practice I'm aware of more 'lock in' behavior in the form of restricting which TOTP client is accepted than for Passkeys. There are many more bespoke 'Authenticator' apps than there are passkey implementations, many of which disallow registering codes in third party wallets.
Bitwarden also syncs TOTP. Given it's the same client, why push folks to opt for a provably weaker protocol with higher potential for user harm?
The people who wrote the spec. If the spec didn't care about what software was being used to handle passkeys, they wouldn't have written in the ability for whatever you're authenticating to to know that.
The spec is bad and the people who wrote it should feel bad.
> In practice I'm aware of more 'lock in' behavior in the form of restricting which TOTP client is accepted than for Passkeys.
I've never seen this before. This reads like FUD to me. Every single site that I use TOTP with (40~ going by the number of secrets I have) didn't give a shit, and I don't see how they could, unless they use Super™ Special™ TOTP™ just because they're so special and wish pain and suffering onto their users. It's just a QR code you scan or a secret you manually type in, which then gives you some numbers you use later, and that's all it should be.
> Bitwarden also syncs TOTP. Given it's the same client, why push folks to opt for a provably weaker protocol with higher potential for user harm?
TOTP doesn't have a higher potential for user harm. If you use it with Bitwarden, the phishing resistance passkeys tout is something you already mostly get (you can still manually copy the code, which I believe to be a good thing, believe it or not).
Given how inconsistently passkeys are implemented and how it's more difficult to get at the actual data being used (unless you export them with Keepassxc (or Bitwarden?), the potential for fuckups is much higher with passkeys.
I'm yet to see someone get phished. It must happen, given that's how passkeys got started. But the far more common ways I've seen are sessions getting snatched and data leaks, neither of which passkeys protect against. It's a marginal benefit in exchange for so many downsides.
It's not FUD. It's just my opinion and a bad spec.
Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Cisco, Steam to name a few.
>It's just my opinion
Fair enough. I find TOTP to be a PITA. I share your ire with user hostile platforms, but I see the passkey protocol as a net benefit to the status quo. It's unclear how a platform's choice to use a stricter version of the protocol is any different than their choice not to implement RFC 6238 at all.
I use normal TOTP with Microslop. Presumably you can opt into a worse version if you use their enterprise software, if you're evil or whatever.
The rest I presume fall into the bucket of 'wants to cause their users pain and suffering'. That's the normal modus operandi for Adobe and Cicso at least. The only one of those I use is Steam, and I haven't needed to log into Steam in over 2 years, since I'm just always logged in. Fair point though.
> Fair enough. I find TOTP to be a PITA.
I do too. Yet passkeys manage to be even more of a pain in the ass with ominous potential consequences on the horizon. If it was TOTP plus some phishing resistance without any actual downside, I'd have no beef. If it was TOTP but simpler, then there's be negative beef. There are however several clear and present downsides to passkeys. That just makes for a worse tradeoff (depending on your values) rather than a genuine improvement.
My suspicion: There is a significant chance I will lose access to one or more account by doing this, so I'm not going to until the air clears. I don't trust the motivations of the services pushing it.
I've never fallen for a phishing attack and any attack targeted and sophisticated enough to catch me is probably going to be sophisticated enough to steal/hijack a passkey anyway. In the extremely improbable event that I did get phished and somebody got into my account somewhere, they'd only have access to that one account because unlike most people I don't re-use passwords and recovery would no more complicated than contacting customer service and resetting my password with them.
Considering the horror stories of people who been screwed by using passkeys, I'm sticking with "not worth the trouble"
This means you never send your private key to the site, so if their database is compromised they only get a public key, which can’t do anything (it is public, after all)
No amount of phishing can get you or your client to hand over your private key, because there is no use case where that is required. There is no possibility of MITM, since your private key is never sent anywhere in any situation.
As for getting locked out of your account, losing your passkey would be the same as losing a password. You would need to follow the site’s password reset flow, and if you can recover from a lost password, you can recover from a lost passkey.
I will poke at this a bit:
> As for getting locked out of your account, losing your passkey would be the same as losing a password. You would need to follow the site’s password reset flow, and if you can recover from a lost password, you can recover from a lost passkey.
Do you think this is one of those scenarios that sounds reasonable at first, but can get torn apart by unknowns, edge cases etc? To use an analogy from a recent HN thread that is stretched a bit, is this like saying "If you use a crypto hardware wallet, you're safe", then reading about compromised hardware wallets due to something outside the assumption set.
A lot of the same Password Manager requirements and best practices apply to Passkey Management such as using strong master passwords or biometric unlocks or device PINs. Using Password Managers that support device bound hardware security enclaves, etc.
But even more so than average Password Management, because Passkeys are public key infrastructure the benefits you get out of the box exceed those of ordinary passwords. One of the factors in most Passkey implementations here is that sites (defined by hostname) all get different public keys. (Users are suggested to use different passwords for every site, but are not required to. Passkeys do that technically and are generally enforced in that effort by browsers and Operating Systems.) Leaking those public keys is no longer an issue (they truly are public keys), and leaked public keys aren't generally useful to other sites and apps. (Passwords that leak and even sometimes salted and hashed passwords that leak are liabilities and can be useful for rainbow table attacks or social engineering attacks or password reuse attacks.)
There are certainly edge cases to Passkey Management but in general the threat models follow Password Management threats: does someone have physical access to your device? Do they have access to your biometrics or device PINs?
But also the blast radius is reduced compared to usual Password Management threats: a single leaked private key generally only impacts a single website/app. Being able to sign a Passkey challenge once doesn't mean unlimited access (a password can be used forever after finding it), because challenges have timestamps and random entropy and generally don't support replay at all.
This is roughly analogous to the difference between swiped/card not present and chip/NFC credit card payments. While a hacked chip/NFC credit card terminal could display a different amount than actually charged, it can't subsequently make additional charges after the card or device is withdrawn.
I generally add keys from two very different Password Managers to every site/app I use Passkeys with. Both Password Managers also sync between multiple devices I own.
Redundancy is already an option. Choice in Password Managers to use for your Passkeys is an option.
I understand that accidental denial of service fear, but the tools exist technically to deal with that fear if you wanted to try to deal with it.
Also, sites can and often do support multiple passkeys, which opens up the possibility of allowing for reliable account recovery using one or more backup devices (one or more YubiKeys, for instance) that is still siginificantly more secure than reset flows using SMS or email.
In other words, my email can be signed in from anywhere on purpose. It's a feature. The chances of me forgetting my password is zero, because I can back it up 7 way to Sunday.
A passkey seems to miss these basic accessibility issues. For a random website, that's fine, but for the service all of websites use to auth me, access is more important than locking it down to one device.
For better and worse, Webauthn is one of the "choose your own adventure" PKI systems where the keys themselves suggest which PKI algorithm/details they use. This is partly because Webauthn has been around a long time and has had to backwards compatibly support a wide variety of physical security keys over the ages.
Most good open source libraries for implementing passkeys will do a good job of limiting passkeys to known good algorithm choices, including any PQ requirements/suggestions. The Passkey standard itself also sets a "higher water" baseline above Webauthn's supported algorithm list.
Also, the same risk applies, but to an even greater degree, with a password.
Little harsh to say I have NO idea what I am talking about, though.
I still don't agree that companies won't revoke their passkeys if we are in a PQ world.
If they don't, you are still in a better place than passwords. Each public/private key pair is unique for every domain, so a compromise in one place is not a compromise in others. Many people re-use passwords (even if you don't).
I liked the idea that passkeys work the same way but now for logging into services like amazon or google etc.
Imagine my face when I learned that that so many interpretations of passkeys exist that actually create that private part in a passwordmanager or chuck it into iCloud or equivalents.
I wondered if the inventor of the private/public keyexchange still lives or if he would spin in his grave hearing what happened...
I would have been on board if the passkeys only existed on your hardware period. I would have accepted that I would need to set up access from devices of my choosing and therefore cannot log into these services from any old "cyber cafe" on a whim.
But I would, as an emergency BCM measure, expect a sort of breakglass phrase that I could obtain and keep safe like at a bank deposit box or similar in case all hardware with keys to said service would die at the same time.
I understand though, that for most all this would look like way to inconvenient and using the cloud instead is so much more convenient which is why they decided to hollow out the concept of the passkey.
I have no doubt users will get confused about which password manager they have their passkey stored in, but these are the same users who don't know what a password manager is so they share a password across everything and get hacked regularly.
The benefit of adding additional authentication methods without disabling others is limited, of course, but it can still be useful where, e.g., you're comfortable logging in using a password manager on your own devices but want to use an iPhone or YubiKey to log in from public computers.
This is the same problem we've had for 20 years with password managers, though.
The solutions are mostly the same as well (with the change to a QR + BLE based mechanism over manual transcription to go cross-device, and a protocol to support moving passwords and passkeys over to different software rather than using a plaintext password CSV export).
Many password managers also manage passkeys (and were managing TOTP before).
I don't know my TOTP secrets. They're far too long for me (or any reasonable human) to memorise them. The only way to use them is to have physical access to them (unless I post them publicly on the internet, which I don't).
My first factor is 'something I know'. That it my password to my password manager. My second factor is 'something I have'. That would be my 2FA codes/secrets. I keep backups of both. Someone getting access to my 2FA secrets is extremely unlikely short of someone breaking into my house and stealing my encrypted NAS or my second encrypted backup. That's not a threat I intend to counter with my threat model. On the other hand, getting locked out of an account is a threat I do intent to mitigate, and thus, not having backups is not a viable alternative for me.
I've done authentication projects for financial institutions that were actively targeted by phishing attacks, and it is difficult to mitigate TOTP phishing. Defeating TOTP is very much in the standard playbook for high-dollar scam operations.
Moreover, the large majority of ordinary people are going to use whatever comes with their phone anyway, which can then lock the key in the device's secure processor by default independent of remote attestation. So then it's not getting you anything for those people and the primary thing it does is to impede Linux Girl from using Linux and anyone new from ever trying to create a competing mobile platform or even a usable non-Google fork of Android.
The obvious way to satisfy people is to remove support for remote attestation from the spec.
By all means, keep lobbying against Passkeys! I don't care. But you'd be shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically to build TOTP into your case, as the comment I replied to originally just did.
If you presume bad faith on the part of basically the entire WebAuthn implementer community, how does this help?
The consumer passkey authenticator implementations of today do not provide attestations, passkey relying parties do not consume them, and both would need to intentionally ship changes to enact the scenario you're worried about. If you're worried about both of these colluding to lock you out of your accounts, it seems naive to think that changes to an (intentionally malleable, extensible) spec will protect you.
Taking it out doesn't mean you don't have to remain vigilant that they might try put it back, but what does it say if they're unwilling to take it out?
Also, what are the legitimate reasons supposed to be that someone can't use an authenticator that follows the standard protocol but is made by a different vendor? The only thing the attestation actually does is make it so that you can't use e.g. GrapheneOS instead of Android, which has a tenuous relationship to being a legitimate prohibition.
Attestation means you can trust that nobody is accidentally or intentionally enrolling some random passkey-presenting device with rogue components.
We just had a front page story here this week about folks buying what they thought were secure hardware cryptocurrency wallets that had been modified maliciously.
You click the "log in with QR code" button, scan the QR code, and authenticate using your phone.
Unfortunately that only works from phone (and watch) to computer. If you don't have the passkey available, you click "forgot password" and set a new one, same as with a password.
It's only a problem if you pick a platform that locks you out, even then there's workarounds. It's not a replacement for logging in every day, it's more a replacement for typing over the 64 character random password from your phone's password manager on the library computer.
In theory phones and watches could implement the other direction and generate the QR codes, there's just less pressure on the ecosystems to make that easy to do so it's not there in practice today.
The CTAP2 protocol has better alternatives, https://github.com/fmeum/WearAuthn is possible because we already can do better. I just hope it'll be implemented at some point (though, realistically, the future is phone-first, despite how much I dislike the implications that carries).
Scan the QR code with your phone.
>What if I can't use cross-device authentication because I'm on a locked-down work machine or one that simply doesn't have bluetooth?
Most devices today ship with Bluetooth and even locked down machines support using your personal phone to authenticate.
>What if I want to consolidate them all in one platform just for the sake of being organised?
Then do that. Use whatever your phone uses.
>What if I lose or simply don't have the device with a certain passkey near me?
Then you will need to use a fallback authentication mechanism or will need to wait until you can get the device. TOTPs have the same issue.
I have had two poor experiences, where passkeys I set up at one point stopped working and I had to generate a replacement, but this was not a problem because I have yet to come across a site that didn’t continue to offer other means of logins.
I don’t see anybody complaining about the login-via-emailed-link which seems to be the much more common trend these days and which I really dislike because it introduces an unwanted delay in login (and I have come across many sites for which this is the only means of logging in).
Most password managers don't even allow you to export/backup the passkeys yourself. (Bitwarden is an exception.)
Instead, password managers support a finicky app-to-app transfer protocol called "Credential Exchange Protocol" (CXP), where you install two password managers at once, and they convey your passwords + passkeys, without ever generating a file that you can read. (And Microsoft's password manager doesn't even support CXP yet. As of today, you can only do it on Android and iOS.)
Many people read that and say, "see, that's why I'm never going to use passkeys! I'm safer managing my own backups, and I'm too smart to be tricked into copying and pasting my password to the wrong site." But they're wrong. You are not too smart to be tricked. Nobody is.
If you use the same cloud-sync password manager everywhere, passkeys just work. If you don't, you'll have to use Credential Exchange Protocol to transfer them, which is a hassle.
It’s up to you to decide whether protecting yourself from being tricked into exporting your passkeys is worth sacrificing your ability to read them.
Maybe, but most websites I really dont care if my account gets hacked. I care way more about being able to login conveniently. Im just as frustrated with seemingly every single website wanting 2fa doing a 2fa check every week or less.
I do this with my work laptop where the passkeys are stored on my personal phone.
Background: the Entra login used to work fine with password + MS Athenticator notification, but recently it forced me to set up a passkey using MS Authenticator (on my phone)... which was all well and good, except that there's no way for me to actually pass the passkey to Entra, so I end up clicking things multiple times (login using other means, selecting password, selecting how I wish to MFA, selecting Authenticator notification etc).. All it did was significantly increase my login times and fallback to password logins.
So I'm not sure how I'm supposed to log in with the passkey, there's no QR code or anything.
This is why passkey are a failure, no one knows how they work, and even one someone claims they know, the reality is often different.
If you try to sign in with passkeys but there are none found on the local machine it will ask if you want to use a usb auth or QR code scan.
It is not remotely difficult to not fall for phishing attacks. I think I've seen one in my entire life which was actually well crafted such that a person might fall for it even if he was paying attention. One. Everything else is the lowest effort slop where all you need to do is hover over the link to see "this does not in fact go to microsoft.com like it claims".
Consider: most (over 50%) of company compromises starts with phishing (or with reuse of compromised passwords, which are also usually sourced from phishing). It's even higher for ransomware attacks specifically btw. This means that if we were able to stop phishing and credential theft, we would cut number of cyberattacks by half! That's not something you can downplay.
If my password manager is entering my password for me, so how can I be tricked? That's the superpower for passkeys, right? It also applies for plain passwords. Infact, if a login page looks familiar, but my password manager doesn't show any matching credentials, that throws up red flags for me, because I only use my password manager.
Passkeys physically don't allow you to send them to the wrong sites so the sites have to make sure they keep working.
That's the biggest issue.
Haven't been tricked so far. On the other hand, I've had a couple of accounts locked because "we don't like your ip", "we want your phone number now", or "we want to send a push notification/text to the phone that just died".
Why would I trade control over my credentials for some potential security gains, while introducing new dependencies on Google, Apple, or whoever runs my password manager - and the very real risk of being locked out of all of my own accounts?
Using all that is just asking for trouble. Turn all off except one.
At my work we are forced to use passkeys internally and it's fine with me.
At some point in the past, due to the constant nagging I set up a passkey on my GitHub account.
I needed to sign in to work's GitHub account, so unknowingly (since there's no SSO option there) I just clicked on "Sign in with a pass key". It didn't ask for my username, just gave me an option to scan QR code. And I did because work's pass key is set up on my personal phone. Then I noticed that it's trying to sign in with my personal GitHub account. It's good that I don't have anything sensitive on there but I really wouldn't want to sign in on my personal account on my work's laptop.
A lot of the "slippery slope" confusion in the past couple of articles has been that this "cheap SSH key" approach was built on top of the same standard for "expensive hardware key" (Webauthn). This is great because it means a rich backwards compatibility story across a long history of devices and "expensive hardware key" remains an option for Passkeys. This is unfortunately confusing because Enterprises still need Webauthn for "only expensive hardware key" usage so need options in the standard like "Attestation" which specifies things like "exactly which expensive hardware key vendor was used".
People see this confusion and think it leads to a slippery slope of attestation being required "in the future", but the reality is more that attestation and things like it were required in the past and are optional now because we realize "cheap SSH keys" are good enough for most users (with some standardization and shared "branding").
Passkeys enforcing keys not be extracted/copyed as plaintext and that keys are per-host/domain are just following ancient SSH best practices.
Because yes the SSH world is sloppy with dangerous plaintext (or modest password encrypted) key copying and reuse. That does make it a "simpler" ecosystem, but that doesn't make it a better ecosystem.
That said, Passkeys generally are frequently copied, most of the ecosystems support multi-device sync and backup. They just aren't done in a way that provide plaintext export if you want to print a book of your Passkeys and store it in a safe deposit box or sloppily `scp` them from one machine to another.
Or it can stay a niche standard most people don't care much about, we'll see.
We are in the era where the average non-technical user doesn't even necessarily know what a file even is, they are used to apps managing everything with Cloud sync and "just working".
Export can be handy for "offline" backup, but in practice the thing to backup offline is the device PIN or Password Manager "master password". Especially because in practice you aren't using just one Passkey, you are using hundreds or thousands. (One per host/domain/app, at least.)
> implement functionality FIDO does not like
The KeypassXC GitHub issue wasn't "FIDO", it was one guy acting like he could make threats on behalf of FIDO, without even the full backing of his employer, much less other members of FIDO. It was bad communication to write a suggestion in the form of a threat and pretending to speak for others.
I've seen this work on both Windows and iOS, where I have sites set up to use passkeys from multiple sources (Yubikey, Windows Hello, Apple Passwords, Microsoft Authenticator app), but I've also seen it not work, so there must be something the site has to do to make this possible.
On the rare occasion I’m logging into a device that isn’t mine, that doesn’t have my password manager on it, scanning a QR code from a device that does have my password manager on it has been enough to get me in. Without sharing any secrets with the foreign device, incidentally
So I’d wager your concerns are valid and are likely to be addressed over time, as this stuff develops rapidly. It might even be better in your scenarios already
Lately it has been a tap-tap operation to enroll a passkey. Sweetwater.com surprised me with it the other day. I was done in seconds, and now I can log in without even having to enter a code. Face ID handles it for both iCloud Keychain and Bitwarden
- it is linked to a domain, as the article states, which makes it less likely to “exposed” in phishing attempts - it is a challenge system, essentially a public private key system, so the private key never leaves your device. Kind of like tls/https. Which means that even if bearer/login token is lost, your “password”(private key) isn’t lost. - also, an obvious bonus is that you get a really long “password” which is practically impossible to guess
Sorry if any of my terminology is wrong here.
If the website doesn't allow you to add multiple passkeys then that's bad ux and that's on them.
I'm a very tech savvy person, and understanding the ins and outs of passkeys has been a time investment, and that's the problem. Technical and security merits notwithstanding, they're a confusing mess. I understand how they work, but what I don't really understand, is how to recover when they don't work.
Selfishly, I end up being tech support for my extended family, and I don't have the stamina to try to explain to them how this works.
Amazon.com, UK, DE, JP, all need different passkeys. Yet my password and TOTP works across them all seamlessly.
And then some pass managers will only store ONE passkey for that login/password.
Its mighty frustrating and while I have been told and see the biometrics make it more secure…
It’s a pain in the arse to now have a stack of domains each in my password manager when searching.
:( In security, you forgo SO MUCH convenience.
I still prefer a good password written down in a paper book, with multiple methods of 2FA. But I know there are attack vectors for that.
The problem to me is that passkeys assume the user owns the device and CAN choose to make a single store authoritative for their credentials. The only professional environments I've encountered that haven't/wouldn't hit this issue are ones small enough that they don't really have device or security governance in place which you can't use as a secure reference baseline.
You can log in by scanning a QR code with your phone, though.
Or you can use a different passkey provider that does work cross-platform. You don't have to use the one built into your phone.
It's true that passkeys do not require hardware and OS attestation today, so all of the specific examples you cite are true. But the point remains that that passkeys can be EASILY extended to require hardware and OS attestation, and this will happen.
Banks have already done this. Before using an app was optional. Play protect was optional. It's like my uncle ted used to say, techonolgy is not optional.
Passwords are client-neutral. Passkeys aren't: you can force a certain client, and now those clients can force an OS through attestation.
It happens now with 2fa today. I have gone through college for 4 years having to use this shitty duo mobile app and we have to take out our smartphones 20 times a day to do things and re-login after every 20 minutes.
anything can happen. if your passkey stops working because you're using it from your smart fridge to access your banking app, then just use your password anyway.
My point here is that this specific step on the slippery slope is a cliff, not some infintessimal change, because now the authentication is done through a program and not copyable information. If verification-can technology is standardized on an OS level and advocated by four out of five tech priests (and maybe even enshrined in law (think of the children)), then you are going to be drinking a whole lot more mountain dew in the future to say the least.
If it was just a single bank or something that tried this, people would get pissed off, leave, and the frog would not be boiled. It takes a slow industry-wide movement to shift the standards of what is acceptible to the common man.
Now they run "Officers are watching! Click it or ticket!" as an advertising campaign.
And I'm not arguing that seatbelt laws are bad per se, just that any time there is a pathway for more control, it will eventually be taken, even if assurances are made that it will not happen.
Imagine being the owner of a small business who is now required, to do business with any providers, to have a rogue executive that is loyal to them rather than you, and overrides your decisions; your provider refuses to sell you any materials if this executive is not obeyed. Do you think any business owner would accept that? I think on the contrary, this practice would be outlawed by Congress or the relevant legislative body in a matter of weeks. Those who voted seatbelts in. Then it's exactly that, if you replace business by computer.
You just have to remind the politicians from time to time - the French are a great example in that.
Most consumer websites won't use attestation.
Places where additional security is required (bank, employer, etc) can.
I don't think that means throwing out passkeys entirely, but that's why you're seeing a lot of "slippery slope" stuff in here
That's my guess, at least. I know next to nothing about attestation and passkeys.
Now that was a good thing with https, not so much with passkeys until Chrome pushes through a change and says they'll only accept attested passkeys issued by their own google password manager/authenticator.
Bank customers: "You don't need to know anything about me."
Also bank customers: "You need to stop anyone who is not me from accessing my money."
Am I missing something? "Attestation tells websites what the authenticator is but it doesn't tell the website what the authenticator is".
The entire argument in this blogpost amounts to "nobody would ever turn on passkey attestation because it would require migration of people who already setup passkeys" which is a questionable argument- you could trivially imagine allowing unattested passkeys for existing users, but require it for new users. Most websites don't yet support passkeys to begin with, so this argument doesn't hold for the majority of websites.
The "biggest providers" bit at the end is odd too because the biggest providers are apple/google- who, as far as I know, do support attestation.
So the "biggest providers" very much have some champions against attestation.
Declarative Configuration is also the thing that allows the controlling corporation to remotely wipe the phone and other such things where they own the phone more than you do.
I know not every person has the luxury of telling their employers that they will not install corporate apps on personal phones and that if their employer wants to own their phone they should pay for a separate work phone. But that is the big scenario to avoid attestation becoming more common in the wild, making sure people realize that "No work apps on personal phones" is maybe something worth striking about.
hardware-bound webauthn tokens are also important since they are more secure
That's where the trap is.
This is your cue to go get your parents to add you as recovery contacts for their Apple account now, rather than finding out that exists when they lose their phone.
> That person is fucked when they lose their phone anyway
I am hoping nowadays most people lock their devices. I rarely see unlocked in my adventures anymore.
One of the most frustrating issues with Apple's UX.
It is plainly obvious that the worry isn't attestation per se, it's the restrictions that attestation may in the future require when they turn the dial on restrictiveness up, that was extremely clear to me from reading the first article. If you can get attestation without those restrictions, "sure, why not", and a Yubikey seems like a way to do that which could avoid those restrictions. Most of this article makes sense, but this particular line makes me wonder how the author got it so far off the mark.
They also did nothing to quell my fears that they will in the future use passkeys to prevent people from using software they can modify themselves by saying "...the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now." as if everyone always followed the guidance, and as if there aren't tens of thousands of managers that think their case is special and they really do need the extra control because they're a bank or handle copyrighted content or have PII or PCI and feel extra risk-averse today.
I don't know if they failed to do so because they can't (and this is a valid fear of the original author) or if they just are bad at reading the room at what the concern is and vastly overestimate how much people trust companies to always have their best interests at heart.
What I am getting from this, though, is "If you authenticate with a yubikey then that's attested, so they can't use attestation through passkeys to make sure your OS and browser aren't modified", and I'm not sure if that's the correct take away or even a correct statement.
Remote attestation is never to your advantage. To do it at all, they have to restrict you to a specific set of device manufacturers and yours may not be on the list.
Then, what does it get you? Google-approved Android phones are allowed, but any attacker can trivially get one of those so knowing it's that type of device is completely worthless. All it does is prevent you from using some other type of device.
Notice that this is different from keeping the key in a HSM, which you can do without remote attestation and without the other side having to do anything at all.
Worse, the "approved" devices often have worse security than the one you want to use, e.g. using a Yubikey as your HSM will generally be better than using a phone which has orders of magnitude more attack surface and is constantly connected to the internet, but the phone is way more likely to be on the approved list than the Yubikey.
The whole point is that once everyone is accustomed to passkeys, they ARE going to ratchet it up to "you need attestation".
This is the browser wars all over again. Google spent something like 20 years winning the browser wars, and once they felt snug and secure, slowly started eroding users' abilities to control the content they see (making features adblock relies on increasingly ineffective).
At the same time the current authentication horseshit of the internet in 2026 is awful. I routinely spend 3+ minutes trying to log into a site - first it blocks logins because of my VPN, then it requires a password reset, then it requires me to login with new password, but then it needs email verification, but then I don't get the email so I have to click resend, then I type in the verification and then it asks for blah blah blah.
I am grateful that LLMs are going to be doing 95% of my browser usage very soon.
It is genuinely an ordeal.
I am grateful that LLMs are going to be doing 95% of my browser usage very soon.
> If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that? Besides, the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now.
This isn't a rebuttal to the claim that they're a hidden dial. It's just saying that it's too early to crank the dial.
>Attestation Isn't What You Think It Is
>The post describes attestation as proving "that an approved passkey manager, operating system, and firmware are in use" which is simply not true.
>When it is present, WebAuthn attestation tells the site the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up. It says nothing about your OS, your browser, your extensions, whether your phone is rooted or jailbroken, your firmware version, or even what colour it is.
This point is bypassed by websites only supporting specific authenticators and then those specific authenticators only supporting specific devices/OSs/browsers/etc via other attestation frameworks.
The big players who want to gatekeep you in their ecosystem do not want attestation - they want you to give them your passkeys for them to store under the guise of "hey, we'll sync it for you!".
A yubikey is easy to use. Buy a second as back-up. If you're clumsy and lose things all the time then set up recovery codes. Add a recovery contact. Use insecure 2fa like TOTP or really insecure 2fa like email/sms/etc. codes.
There's plenty of options for authentication in the modern world and passkeys are at the top. If users are 'too stupid' to use them then that's a user problem.
I'd rather spend the 5 minutes reading how these things work and then not hand the keys over to big tech.
Wishful thinking. Sadly, the vast majority of people will be perfectly OK with a website telling them they have to use a recent iPhone or Play-enabled Android phone to do something. This is already the case for banking apps and a huge number of other phone-app-only services.
You can’t just stop using those websites if your university uses them for student/employee accounts.
Passwords just suck. If we're all going to use password managers anyway, what is the point? Might as well use a randomly generated passkey.
>If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that?
The original didn't argue that, nor has absolutely anyone else concerned, nor has that been what has happened in historical examples people were concerned about. Because yeah of course that's ridiculous, it's "boiling a frog" by throwing it in already boiling water, that's not how it works. If anyone has freedom-reducing longer term plans for use of passkey attestation, the emphasis is on "longer term", being malicious doesn't mean being stupid. Step 1 is obviously getting people into the passkey ecosystem and out of passwords at all, which could well take years. And importantly as much as possible into closed passkey ecosystems. This is indeed one of the initial danger signs, because the author:
>iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden
Is mixing together things that aren't like the other. Quick author, what's the EXPORT story for each of these ecosystems? Of those, Bitwarden can export a passkey into a plain JSON if you want. Do the others support that too, or at best only "app to app" encrypted transfer, creating a closed ecosystem? Already, can I get passkeys from iCloud/Google/1Pass into KeePass? Or is this restricted """for my protection :^)"""?
Author doesn't even touch on the lock-in that's already beginning. And right now everyone can technically claim "oh no of course you're not locked in! You just have to use an official option, or you can merely visit hundreds of sites individually and register new passkeys in all of them". Is it hard to see how players like Bitwarden would be pressured on continuing to offer plain export?
Then when most of the population is using passkeys everywhere in a closed ecosystem, now what is the response if friction slowly starts getting added. OK, you can still use what you like, but only export to other approved players. OK, you can still use unattested, but it's off by default now, "advanced users" can go enable it with this checkbox in the settings. OK, manual is still an option, but now it's buried deep and behind dark patterns and requires a text command. Hi everyone, we have statistics to show that only 0.85% of our users still use unattested keys. The support burden and security risk is now too high."
Like, we've seen this movie before.
I know where my password manager syncs, it's on all my devices. Passkey prompts always seem confusing, I don't know if it's going to save to my browser, or my OS, or if those are gonna sync on what devices. It's just more confusing.
What would I gain from using a passkey?
This cannot happen with passkeys at all because crypto magic.
My password manager matches off of domains too, so it wouldn't suggest to autofill on a phishing site.
But GP is saying that when the passkey is not auto-entered, the user will just use password-based login.
So the mistake will still happen even if passkeys are enabled and used, as long as password-based login remains as an option.
which they have to be, right? since passkeys are "temporary" in that they are easily lost/destroyed/temporarily unavailable, and sites are supposed to support multiple of them?
That's way too optimistic.
The core reason people enter the password in different domains is because most services suck at keeping a canonical login page. That forces users to register multiple URLs for a single credential. And from times to times, they hit a page not within their registered urls, will login and just add the new url to the pool.
Will these services magically become super competent because of passkey ? I'll respectfully doubt it.
They might not screw this specific aspect, but they'll screw enough other things that users will need to keep injecting password somewhere from times to times.
The number one gain I see with passkeys is that they are phishing resistant. The biggest issue I've had with TOTP keys is they aren't phishing resistant.
Forcing people to use passkeys gives the authentication layer a stronger means to ensure that people are logging into the correct domain. A password manager accomplishes this, but it's very difficult to enforce. (I've heard a number of variants of "John Smith sent me an important document and when I went to open it, the password manager didn't work so I just copied password")
The correct question is What did others gain?
- Phishing free press fingerprint or faceID or Windows Hello for login into many important sites
- many people don't have time to type password, then otp. If most of the world did that then this would not be needed.
- And finally, YOU are not OBLIGED to use it. Let the rest of population use it.
- It is like SOME pay with phone/NFC-Watch etc. MANY still use card or cash...
They are.
Here are some experiences people had with the HSA mandate: https://www.reddit.com/r/HSA/comments/1o1ge7p/healthequity_p...
To note you can still just give up your account and money, technically you're not _forced_. But that's a trend that will go on IMHO.
And the solution was: make it the user's problem.
Yay.
> When it is present, WebAuthn attestation tells the site the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up. It says nothing about your OS, your browser, your extensions, whether your phone is rooted or jailbroken, your firmware version, or even what colour it is.
So if I was Netflix or a bank or w/ever I'd only allow new registrations from "trusted" authenticators, which would incidentally only run on iOS and play-protected Android.
Dear Yubico / Kensington / Google Titan, can I export my private key components to this other device, or even print them out on paper for storage?
No - you're just an untrustworthy user granted the fleeting privilege of using BigCorp devices. Now stop asking such questions or you might have your attestation revoked.
Passkeys face the same problem as the USB-C rollout. Lots of different incompatible implementations and standards rolled under one name that are almost impossible to distinguish between. Very little education on how to use it and be prepared for it.
The difference is that the consequences of getting passkeys wrong for the user is significantly greater than getting the wrong cable, and while the latter can easily be fixed, the former may be irreversible.
So many words spent on HN articles complaining about USB-C or praising Lightning... fast forward a few years to now and I legitimately just pack one cable in my bag and charge any device I happen to bring with me.
> 1Password for iOS exports ... directly to other supported apps, including your passkeys.
They pick the list of other supported apps. There is no ability to export to a standard encrypted file, nor is there a way to develop an open source app that can receive an export over the objections of 1Password Inc.
Passkeys are a trap, trying to lock users in to the service providers.
I did say I like and use 1Password, but I do remember that they switched from a one-time payment model to a subscription model, and have now stopped supporting the old software and only support their subscription software. If it wasn't for my non-tech-savvy, aging family I support their usage of 1Password for, I would still be on Keepass[XC] for my own private usage.
I keep seeing major players promoting their own apps over standard TOTP, which I guess could be seen as a sort of proprietary passkey. Shopify, Google, Microsoft, and more, they all want you to download their app for MFA, instead of using a very open format.
As someone who works in IT, I just can't even imagine myself doing this. I have probably around 60 codes in my Aegis, how would it look if I had just a quarter of those in apps instead?
But the main issue I have with passkeys is the simple issue of backups. I can backup my Aegis keys, I can't backup an app, or a hw passkey. I have to get a second one, and keep signing for it or something, not sure of the details, I just know it would be a major hassle. And there is no way I'm trusting a little usb device to not break.
Right now I see no compelling reason to switch from regular OTP codes, change my mind.
The phishing potential?
Just came back from doing a bit of research and apparently I can use Bitwarden to generate and store passkeys.
I have been dismissing the entire concept because I assumed it had to do with hardware keys, which I would never trust. But if it's bitwarden, then I can easily do a backup, and that would be very reliable.
I think I'm going to start using passkeys... :D
Currently they aren't tied to that root of trust.
Most of those organizations have shown that they don't want people owning their own devices or being able to run their own software, and they use developer attestations, IE a revocable programming license to accomplish that.
Tools like android's safetynet makes it so that you can't run banking apps on a phone running your own software. One that bypasses developer attestations.
Passkeys are currently an open standard, but attestation is built in such a way as that it could be only usable on n approved operating system with programmer licenses.
Big websites like amazon, or websites you need to exist in society, could gradually start requiring the usage of attested passkeys.
---
There is a clear path from passkeys to the death of general purpose computing for 99% of people. Don't be a useful idiot, don't assume these corporations have your best interest in heart. See this for what it is, a path towards killing people's ability to run unlicensed software on their own devices.
True, but doesn’t actually refute the original.
I don't know when it started, I don't know who is to blame, but we've definitely arrived at a conceptualization of "the user" that is passive, uncurious, and incapable of being talked to like an adult.
Maybe it was too strong to say the were a "trap", but it is also too strong to say there is no worries here.
> This one can be tricky because I've seen many sites using passkeys to replace passwords, but that's not something we've done on Report URI, passkeys are used as a 2FA mechanism.
[0]: https://scotthelme.co.uk/xss-is-deadly-for-passkeys-the-hidd...
I agree - and that makes me wish that the messaging was more clear from passkey supporters. Some may be genuinely confused and talking about one or the other mode (or not even realize that multiple modes exist), and some may be trying to claim the benefits of one mode while/or handwaving away the tradeoffs of the other mode.
That is your choice as the user. You can use the default credential manager that is offered out of box, or you can use your own.
As for choice as the user, it's a choice "for now"... and only for users who understand all of these details (which seems unlikely).
Personally, my observation is that if one tries to properly configure 2FA with any major website lately (no, I don't mean AWS console), the level of "your choice" and properly implemented security has actually gotten worse...
Create GH issues or use the feedback form if you believe there are issues with the content!
I use Safari, Chrome, MacOS, a Google Pixel phone, and 1Password. I have passkeys in 1Password, but it's a crap shoot if I'm able to login on a device.
Chrome wants me to use Google Password Manager. There's no option in chrome://settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager. If I try to use a passkey to login to GitHub Chrome pops up a modal that lets me choose between iCloud Keychain, Use a phone or tablet, or USB security key. There's no option to use a different credential manager.
Safari wants to use my iCloud Keychain. There's no option in MacOS Settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager. If I try to login to GitHub I get an option to Scan QR Code or Use Security key. There's no option to use a different credential manager.
My Pixel wants to use Google Password Manager. There *is* an option in Pixel Settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager, but it doesn't work in Chrome. All I can do it select "use another device" and it shows a QR code. There's no option to use a different credential manager.
Essentially every OS and browser thinks I want to use a phone for my passkey, and this is exactly the situation that I and everyone else is bothered by. I do not want to tie my login credentials to a phone that can be lost/stolen/bricked and will be replaced in several years.
So no, you can not use your own credential manager.
macOS: Settings > General > Autofill & Passwords. Turn on 1Password. https://support.1password.com/macos-autofill/
[0]: One great bit of environmental storytelling is the "Made with <3 by the passkey community" in the footer. "Passkey community" of course means timcappalli with minor contributions from two others. You might remember him from https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss....
Passkeys are the second prong of the age verification push.
If you want more evidence, read up on Project 2025’s plans for forcing the internet to adhere to American Christian Nationalist values, then try to figure out how that could work in the absence of passkeys.
The fact that the attestation field exists at all is damning proof that they made overt plans to move in that direction. Passkeys are the mark of the beast, friends don't let friends use Passkeys, etc., etc.
Me: The person who posted this post critical of The King on Facebook was totally not me!
Police: Here's "a WebAuthn attestation" that told Facebook "the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up" and it fits Evidence A.
No thanks.
The make and model of your authenticator is shared with about 2 million other Yubikeys, if anything they'll compare your public key, not the attestation process.
I think they've been implemented well in some cases. I think they've been implemented poorly in others.
So it goes.
A defining feature of traps is that they start out good.
There are a lot of good points in this article, but it fundamentally missed the point of the word trap. The most it said on that topic is:
> If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that? Besides, the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now.
I have to admit I don't worry too much about the entire internet flicking attestation=true anytime though, because the resulting support nightmare would be ferociously expensive. I wouldn't be surprised that, on its own, it would be more expensive than the cases that the companies flipping the switch are trying to avoid. Which means it isn't going to happen.
The simple truth is metaphorical-Grandma can't handle the degree of responsibility put on the user that strict hardware attestation implies. Netflix et al are more likely to want metaphorical-Grandma's money more than an incremental improvement in their ability to be sure it's an attested login, and won't want metaphorical-Grandma to call Netflix every other week trying to figure out how to log in again. There is no way around the fact that strict attestation implies more user responsibility to make sure they don't lose their token, and at scale, they absolutely will. Work environments can get away with this because work environments have a scalable mechanism to re-verify identity to the extent the business cares about it personally, and reissue tokens. At scale the big companies do not have this for individuals. You can't use hardware attestation without this infrastructure for reverification, and any infrastructure for reverification a large corporation tries to create will have exploitable holes in it.
Why the past tense? Here's a list of FIDO Alliance board members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDO_Alliance#FIDO_members. I would love a spreadsheet with their positions on remote attestation - let's start with the banks.
The standard and implementations are also unnecessarily complex and obtuse. IMHO passkeys are not a good technology.
Every single IT person thought it would be an extreme mess, too complicated for regular users. In my company we work on the (gas) grid so lot's of blue collar types.
We went there, gave the pilot group a Yubikey and said: This is like the company pass you already have. Without the company pass you cannot enter any buildings. Without the Passkey you cannot enter a computer or app.
If you lose it report to the same people (service desk).
The response has been EXTREMELY POSITIVE. People fucking LOVE getting rid of passwords, password requirements and taking off their gloves to enter it every time.
We are now rolling it out to everyone and next year when we stop our silly "phishing game" contract we will actually save money while reducing a massive cyber security risk for our company: (voice) phishing.
I mean you're logging in to some software, surely they need some info from you?
Initially, they will probably “just” require hardware serial numbers or similar (so they can join IDs on the backend).
There are already serious proposals to require live web cam feeds for porn site login biometrics purposes, so I can’t really come up with any hyperbole to add.
THIS is the reason it worked great for your use case. You have a stopgap for the worst case.
You also have a limited, well-known, and mandated set of compatible software and hardware. And you don't have to worry about attestation preventing you from using any future hardware or software, because you have control over any attestation whitelists.
The scenario people worry about is not "passkeys being mandated by your company to access company webapps on company-provided devices, with easy access to in-person passkey resets". The scenario people worry about is passkeys making them lose access to third-party sites on their own devices.
Practical experience from Austria where attestation is used to limit which hardware tokens can be used for the EU digital identity: it sucks. You're limited to a very limited number of keys: https://www.id-austria.gv.at/de/hilfe/hilfe-zu-ida/authentif...
Now: will more people do this? I don't know. But I fault the standard for enabling it in the first place.
Exactly. From the page about the requirements for the app under 1) in your link:
> System requirements
> Android 12 or iOS 16
So one of four methods is, by default, already completely dependent on having an account with $american_megacorp.
4) is another app where it doesn’t outright say, but I’m guessing the requirements are also a mainstream OS, mobile at that as well since they seem to use biometrics.
That leaves 2) dedicated hardware and 3) dedicated hardware. Great. (see the “my house burned down” article/thought experiment as to why I’m against that.)
State Farm is the only place I've actually liked it. I don't have to type ANYTHING in.
Open browser, open password manager, click the "sign in with existing passkey", browser and password manager talk, prompt me to confirm the passkey choice, and I'm in.
Most sites I've messed with insist on you entering a username first.
A lot of them do that to detect if they need to trigger an SSO flow. It's awfully annoying. Things get extra fun when a website migrates from email+password to SSO and suddenly you have two accounts that both exist in their system, one of which doesn't work if you hit enter before the SSO javascript redirect happens.
Otherwise, it is a trap. The story of the last 25 years of the internet is user hostile ratcheting away of the open web. Passkeys are obviously another step in the process.
If there is any unique id that can track you, then it's a trap. No security system should be leaking unique ids that can be used to track users.
---
The author has strong incentives for the success of passkeys.
1. Scott Helme is founder and CEO of Report URI, and Companies House records his ownership at over 25% and up to 50%. Report URI markets a "Passkeys Protection" offering, giving him a commercial interest in services for passkey adopters.
2. His WhyNoPasskeys.com campaign pushes websites to adopt passkeys, is sponsored by Report URI, and promotes its passkey protection services. The "Passkeys Are Not a Trap" article also carries a Report URI sponsor banner.
3. Troy Hunt, Helme’s Report URI business partner and investor, joined 1Password’s advisory board in 2020; Helme has also appeared in Hunt’s 1Password-sponsored content. That establishes an indirect vendor connection.
It's not because people are bought by the powers that be, it's the way the world works. People enter the fields they have expertise in.
Research funding is hardly perfect, but most of the people studying climate change are doing actual research and trying to draw evidence based conclusions that hold up under peer review. Their incentives are not the same as a tech founder who could potentially make generational wealth if one particular outcome is realized.
Having said that I am strongly anti-passkey so I don't need any convincing, but I prefer technical arguments.
QED, a trap.
I'm generally pro-passkeys, but also acknowledge they are a hot mess for the average non-techy consumer. And there does seem to be room for the screws to tighten, and we definitely need to resist that.
They can request you store the passkey in something non-exportable, but many software passkey providers simply lie about being super duper secure.
This is the first time I've seen this issue, very weird. Then again, I had to apply some kind of hack to enable TOTP back in the day (something about faking an RSA key fob), so I'm not surprised Paypal is stil shit.
(the UX flows around passkeys are horrendously inconsistent between implementations in general, but even still paypal is a bit of an outlier.)
Since passkeys are tied to verified devices, they guarantee absolute de-anonymization -- and further spread that advertising "wealth" by seamlessly linking across devices, and therefore to their respective corporate stakeholders (i.e. via bluetooth to conveniently login on a laptop via a phone-domiciled passkey).
Username + password at least requires circumstantial marketing analysis to "verify" whether a user is who marketers think they are. But with passkeys, your login confirms your Windows account ID, cell phone MAC address, home address, what have you.
Contributions and feedback are welcome! GitHub link is at the bottom of the page.
I just don't think that's a good idea for most users. Imagine an older relative being coaxed into exporting all their passkeys in plaintext and uploading them to a website.
Besides all that, the standard supposedly supports types of passkeys 1. bound to the device (not a security key) that cannot be handed off at all, or 2. can only be used in certain apps. I'm guessing the first case is more for corps that only want employees logging in with issued corp devices, but why the second one?
Everything has conditions, which is why I'm wondering why this isn't just an unconditional "yes, it's your key, do whatever you want."
Largely false. The Pixel verifies the OS and will reveal `verifiedBootState != Verified` on GrapheneOS in the attested passkey at registration, which websites may choose to reject. Apple Silicon has an undocumented SEP which prevents Asahi Linux from accessing it. There may be other examples now or in the future.
Also, I think you can deduce the device color from [1] on Android.
So, in conclusion: https://storage.ghost.io/c/ee/88/ee889f88-37ef-43e5-9180-f9b...
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/keystore/a...
Was going to say, GrapheneOS must not have the same AAGUID as whatever Google Play approved type they want to whitelist.
I'm sorry, but if your system allows someone to make a credible threat like this, you should make sure to redesign your protocol so that kind of abuse is not possible BEFORE advocating for it. I'm so incredibly sick of people repeating history, only to disappear once we're all roped into yet another anti-user scheme.
And yes, passkeys absolutely ARE a trap.
[0]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
> This one can be tricky because I've seen many sites using passkeys to replace passwords, but that's not something we've done on Report URI, passkeys are used as a 2FA mechanism.
Source: https://scotthelme.co.uk/xss-is-deadly-for-passkeys-the-hidd...
Passkeys have benefits - but they also have problems. Many people just don't think the benefits are worth the problems. And many people are afraid that sites will just stop accepting passwords in favor of passkeys, leaving people worse off.
Few weeks later
>let me tell you why you should NOT use XYZ!!
Classic HN.
That being said, password and 2FA is the best combo, where you control the token of the 2FA and it’s on a separate app/platform/etc than where you have your passwords.
I don't use passkeys anywhere for fear of losing access. I just don't care enough to study how it really works. With passwords, I occasionally print out all my important passwords and store them in a safe and I know there's no way I could lose access.
you can have a TOTP variant which has the browser display a challenge string & QR code, authenticator generates a 5-6 digit response. include more entropy in the response if you want to do away with the password entirely.
passkeys are trash, I would never opt for dedicated hardware (or a cloud service) and using them with a password manager is extremely messy when you want the password manager to be properly isolated from the rest of your system.
I can imagine it gets annoying very fast if you accidentally put a passkey in the wrong place, ie because Chrome proposes it's own credentials store.
ProtonPass also lets me export the private parts so I'm not stuck as with some passkey managers.
Passkeys are great but require you to understand some things about them, and you need discipline in dealing with them.
I think they are a trap. A usability nightmare. So, I acquiesce to a passkey to a site while on my iPhone and now I cannot log onto it from my work desktop in Firefox. An older person sets it up on his or her Google account, gets a new phone (iPhone to Android) or Android to iPhone doesn't matter and loses access. We know that Google won't help a regular consumer with anything.
Syncing may be a thing in theory but the friction is huge.
Passkeys are a trap - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048312 - Oct 2026 (571 comments)
Ricky Mondello responds to "Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50061290 - Oct 2026 (14 comments)
But what is the solution here does anyone know how to make this good?
1. A password manager that generates my passwords stored on an external USB key (which is itself encrypted). I use KeepPassXC.
2. More than one Yubikey doing U2F.
I know how to backup #1 and I have more than one of #2 to handle losing a Yubikey. #2 gives me phishing protection.
- we support iso 8601
- really?! Like P1Y2M3DT4H5M6S?
- err, no, I mean 2026-12-31
- trying to sign in to Okta on my personal Linux desktop computer. It has bluetooth and I had my phone right next to me, also with bluetooth turned on. But Firefox simply refuses to even show the option for "connect to your phone" or to give a QR code... it just said "tap your security key or biometric device". I had neither; my passkey is on my phone. Then it timed out and I gave up trying to log in.
- trying to sign in on my work Macbook using Google Chrome (enterprise managed one). For some reason, upon scanning the QR code, my phone was stuck on "Connecting..." and timed out. I had bluetooth turned on on both devices, they were five centimeters apart, both were connected to internet with a great gigabit connection. It turns out, I had to quit and restart Chrome and it magically started working.
- trying to sign in on my work desktop using a physical Yubikey remotely using VNC. It's not possible by design. I had to get my coworker to press my Yubikey in the office.
- trying to get Muse and OpenAI Dot to sign in using a passkey. It's not possible by design.
Generally, the user experience is really horrible with passkeys. It is also ironic that it trusts my phone (used for shitposting; easily lost or stolen) instantly, but simply refuses to trust my personal Linux desktop computer, which is fully encrypted, securely stored in my house, and contains all my life's work and everything that is dear to me.
https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-...
1> Synced Software Passkeys (e.g., Google Password Manager, Apple iCloud Keychain): Encrypted locally but synchronized across a cloud account.
2> Device-Bound Software Passkeys (e.g., Microsoft Authenticator app on a phone): Only inside the physical device's secure hardware chip.
3> Device-Bound Hardware Passkeys (e.g., YubiKey, RSA iShield Key): Permanently burned into a dedicated physical USB/NFC chip.
I advocate for "Device-Bound Hardware Passkeys," but not many websites support them. Keeping a duplicate hardware passkey is important in case the original hardware key is lost.
Attestation lock down is also ALREADY a real thing. Microsoft sites (and others) frequently require you to use their bespoke 2FA app instead of using the open TOTP protocol. They will do the same thing when it comes to deciding which devices and software are allowed to login, and everything outside the corporate slop safety bubble will be denied.
I use unique email addresses and passwords, stored only on my devices(Linux, Windows, Android) using open source software (KeepassXC, KeepassDX). Passkeys add new friction I don't need.
"Model of the authenticator" could say almost everything about these if the model was let's say "Google Pixel 10". TEE would refuse to sign the attestation if the bootloader was unlocked / AVB didn't verify.
YubiKey attestation is not a problem because the device doesn't work against me in such a way it would require installing custom software on it. And even if YubiKey went crazy, they're not a monopoly.
Situation with smartphones is very much different..
“Once I set up a passkey I can’t log in from another device” - have never seen this to be the case. Existing password / OTP codes have always worked as a fallback if syncing somehow breaks.
“I don’t want to trust Apple/MS/Google with my logins” - so don’t. Use bitwarden or 1Password or lastpass or whatever you want to store your passkeys.
“If I lose my phone I’m screwed” - see #1 and enable sync maybe?
Boils down to I believe a lot of folks looked at passkey implementation at a high level, saw some potential pitfalls, and never actually used them to discover those pitfalls have all been accounted for.
Go ahead and skip passkeys if you want, but stop preaching about evils that don’t exist.
This literally happened to my grandfather yesterday (well, I found out about yesterday, anyway). Dude just casually mentions that he can only log into his webmail on his iPad, and I immediately knew what was up.
"so don’t. Use bitwarden or 1Password or lastpass or whatever you want to store your passkeys." -- All fine and dandy until they decide to start using that attestation feature that they 'pinky promise' they won't use for nefarious purposes.
Passkeys are literally evil, and exist exclusively because 1) companies are evil, and want nothing short of complete and utter domination of their users' lives and 2) one CEO is embarrassed that he was too stupid to realize that "my password manager isn't autofilling" means "I'm on the wrong website".
There are comments here about companies that already force the use of Microsoft Authenticator, which forces you to use a locked-down phone.
A lost passkey should be treated the same as a lost password.
Sites that implement passkeys need to have an account recovery mechanism. Granted, not every site does this correctly. Don't use passkeys on sites that don't have a recovery mechanism!
Secondly, the site you're authenticating to must allow you to have multiple passkeys. You either have a cloud-synced password manager so that all of your devices get the same passkey, or you have a passkey per device that you use to access the site. Again, not every site allows multiple passkeys. Don't use passkeys on sites that don't allow you to have multiple passkeys.
For a site implements both of these properties correctly, if you lose your device, you just connect to the site with your new device, perform whatever account recovery procedure (TOTP, email verification, phone verification, ...), create a new passkey, and, ideally, disable the passkey from your lost device.
I literaly just had to unfuck my grandfathers webmail because of this garbage. "oh, I can only log into my email on my ipad now" and I immediately knew the shadowy cabal of evil over at the FIDO Alliance were to blame.
It is up to us technical users to make sure the other 90% of society don't fall for this shit. Tell them it's the mark of the beast, tell them that it's fascists seizing control of your identity, tell them whatever will make them run for the damn hills anytime they see "alternative ways to sign in".
Passkeys did better day 1 because they synced, probably just cause password managers are better now than back in the TOTP days. But for some reason the standard has a way for them to force you to use like a WEF-approved KYC passkey store.
1. They should be locked down to a single device.
2. They should not be allowed to be copied from device to device.
3. Syncing between devices is perfectly acceptable.
My main reason for not using it is I'm not interested participating in a scheme where I do not own/access the private keys and being able to use them and store them the way I want to.
I'm fine with TOTP and sure, I understand it's not phishing resistant by itself.
Passkeys are not designed just for security, there are other corporate interests involved. It's impossible to share logins for example. He even mentioned this concern and didn't address it.
The device/app lockdowns are already real for TOTP - Microsoft and others insist on using their snowflake authenticator instead of using the standard protocol. So it's not unlikely that they will extend that kind of lock-in to all passkeys.
The fact that passkeys are not required to be portable is the entire trap
I hope anyone who is promoting these things has to help and elderly relative do something in an account they are having trouble accessing where they had to use a passkey to set it up. Or try giving your spouse access to a health account they need to access in a hurry. Or make a physical backup that a family member can use in case something happens to you and or your computer.
Setting that aside, I would suggest people strongly consider them for their 2-3 most critical sites. You primary email, your main bank/investment account, and any cloud infra / dns registrations you have.
IMO, for these the trade-off between usability and security is strongly in favor of passkeys. I use 4 hardware keys for these accounts (USB-A and USB-C on my keychain, USB-C in the laptop, and a USB-C backup locked away).
Makes me think there is some sort of conspiracy, even if this is reasonably argued and seems true.
> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties
This threat, because someone dared to give users control, is completely unacceptable to me.
The entire thing where some websites let you set them up, some force them on you, and some just surprise you.... sucks.
The fact that Passkeys don't have an easy migration path between secret storage tools is also a problem.
But if you know what you're doing they are not only perfectly safe, but REALLY safe. Much safer than any other option we have. And seriously way more convenient as well.
A point I don't see mentionned: switching accounts with passkeys is a PITA. Yes it's an implementation issue, there is no technical reason for sites to auto-log you with a passkey when you have one.
But as you point out it will be more convenient for a majority of people, so right now switching between multiple accounts when any of them has a passkey is a hell of itself.
Some password managers might handle it well now, I'd be curious to know as I'm won't be doing these kind of experiments again until there is a reasonable chance to go well.
How's that not just a terrible idea that leads to all of the aforementioned scenarios?
By adopting this you give the site ability to require a specific app and/or hardware for keeping your keys.
This is grade A horseshit. The end goal is for enterprise passkey managers to not boot up at all and not unlock their encrypted stores if hardware attestation isn't available. There's no use in attesting a certain password manager vendor if the platform isn't helping to avoid impersonation.
The real trap is when Google decides in a few years that third party passkey managers will no longer be granted an ability to use the Chrome extension APIs, and Google Sync and other pay-to-play vendors are the only supported ways to handle passkeys. uBlock was just the beginning.
I'm sticking with my passwords for now. Some providers ::cough:: Meta ::cough:: have become openly hostile to allowing anyone to login to their services, but most haven't made it too cumbersome yet.
The various implementations have a huge "trust me bro" feel to them, and I don't feel like spending 3 hours on the phone to Amazon talking to an AI in order to not get my account back to bother with them. And the underhanded way they keep trying to slip them by me bothers the shit out of me. Something sketchy is going on, and it isn't in my best interests is the feeling I get every time it pops up.
Why does my bank (Chase) allow iCloud but not KeePass XC? Imagine if my bank got to choose what password managers I was allowed to use to write my password into. That is literally Passkeys, with optional cryptographic enforcement that people promise won't be used for anti-consumer reasons. (People. Not Microsoft or Google or Apple, but people.)
Secure Boot and TPM were also billed somewhat similarly in different times and now Windows 11 requires it and a lot of software and games require remote attestation with secure boot.
This cover story has already been used before, we already saw where it leads. Will people be foolish enough to believe it wouldn't happen twice?
1. Verification of the legitimacy of the passkey. 2. Passkeys are a support nightmare if you don't restrict what can be used, and the only way to restrict is by using attestation.
If you don't restrict down, there is nothing stopping someone from setting up a passkey in Edge or Chrome or Windows Hello (not Windows Hello for business), and depending on what device or profile they are signed into, when they go onto another device, no passkey.
If someone is a single device user and only uses their corp device to access, and the corp only cares about phishing resistant MFA from an Entra perspective, as part of the auth strength configuration, Windows Hello for Business is enabled by default.
Like, the far away computer tries to check if my phone is nearby, and it's not, therefore I must not be authorizing the login.
If anyone knows how to fix this I would be happy to learn.
I feel like every time I have added a passkey to an account I've been forced into it, and I didn't fully understand the implications.
I can’t get phished if I use autofill. It’s that simple.
Its a solution not made in mind multiplatform people.
No thanks, I'll keep using the MS authenticator on my phone for 2FA instead.
Btw: sites cannot phish my passwords if only the browser remembers passwords and ... drumroll... binds them by site, just like passkeys.
The Substack blog post focuses on "control", specifically the control that users might sacrifice by using passkeys:
"What's important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys. "
"With passwords, you can choose where to write them down; with authenticator apps, you can decide for yourself which ones to use (they're pretty interchangeable); and with physical security keys you can hand them to your colleague if you really trust them."
https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-...
According to the Substack post, passkeys, per the specification, carry the potential for requiring specific hardware or software
Whether any company is using them this way yet is not the point
"If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that? Besides, the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now."
This is addressed in the Substack post:
"This means that once Twitter (formally X) is satisfied that the overwhelming majority of its users would be unaffected, they can flip the switch - perhaps not all at once, perhaps just for ten thousand users at a time so as not to cause a fuss - and start rejecting non-attested passkeys."
The point is that a website _could_ do that. It's possible and there's a pathway set up to do it via the specification
The first step is getting users, a majority of them, to switch to passkeys
The "security researcher" does not say (a) this cannot happen, he claims (b) it will not happen
The (b) response conveniently sidesteps the point
When HN readers see the term "attestation" they might think of Google's scheme for remote attestation
1781305131 | Google's new remote attestation scheme is as terrible as old scheme | https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510372 | 0 comments
1783608717 | Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old one | https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/googles-new-remote-att... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846883 | 1 comment
"Attestation Isn't What You Think It Is"
"YubiKeys are the authenticators that do attestation."
Of course Yubico recommends against attestation
https://developers.yubico.com/Passkeys/Passkey_relying_party...
However whether any website is requiring attestation via passkeys yet, or recommending it, is not the point
The point is that this possibility is contemplated in the specification; using passkeys opens the door to the possibility of requiring attestation
There is nothing inherently wrong with attestation
What matters is who would be doing it, e.g., Big Tech, and how they might use it to further their goals
Alas, that's outside the control of the user
That is the point: loss of control
https://fidoalliance.org/metadata/
"MDS acts as a global registry of passkey capabilities and equips your FIDO server with the intelligence needed to make data-driven decisions about which devices are allowed to access your systems."
Some users may be concerned about websites requiring them to use particular hardware and/or software
There is nothing inherently wrong with MDS
But it could be used to exclude users with "unacceptable" computers and/or "unacceptable" software
Will it. Who knows. That's not the point
"TOTP Is a Step Backwards"
"A passkey is bound to the domain it was created for, so your browser simply won't use your example.com passkey on examp1e.com. "
"This is the problem that passkeys solve."
This seems like a relatively small step; tradeoff for TOTP users seems worth it
It the answer is "no" and you can ship an passkey implementation without passing a comprehensive conformance test then basically passkeys will always have issues. You can not get a million devs to do anything correctly unless you have a way to force them to do it. Given Google/Apple/MS are effectively gatekeepers (I know people will hate this idea) but, you could make it a requirement to pass a conformance test before the gatekeepers will issue a passkey. Same as cert authorities.
Anything else IMO is doomed to fail. More sites than not can't be bothered to use input type="email" or type="number" when all they accept is numbers or email. What hope do we have they'll use passkeys correctly?
The argument of the site hinges on the fact that attestation cannot be activated for an already generated passkey. But that is a BS argument. Right now, the industry tries to get the user used to the workflow of passkeys, the tools, how to use them etc.
Once a critical mass of users uses passkey, you CAN switch on attestation overnight: You simply prompt the user that he needs to create a new passkey because the old one is no longer valid. The user knows the procedure and will simply create that new passkey to be able to login, this time with attestation enabled. Hell, we even have those "You were logged out of your account for security reasons" flow everywhere (looking at you, Google). Make it a dark pattern and require that regenerating when the user needs to login the most, and voila you bait-and-switched your critical userbase.
The fact that passkeys are not expected to be backed up and freely be exported between password managers and wallets is not helping here (you are by the standard not supposed to be able to do that, but user-friendly wallet today simply ignore that part of the standard).
I use GeforceNow, and everytime I start a new session to play Battlefield 6, EA makes me enter my password and sends me an OTP via email before I can play the game (due to GeforceNow, they don't save it for future sessions). It is horrible UX, and I would want turn that off. You know what, the whole world can use my account to play BF6, I don't care. THEY care so I don't share my GeforceNow+BF6 credentials with other people. An attested passkey, bound to a fixed device cannot be passed on. Add 24h cooldown on passkey changes, and you effectively stop account sharing.
Turns out, my Android version is too old. I can only use pass keys stored in google. It doesn't support using them from another provider. Need a newer version.
The argument that TOTP could be entered in the wrong domain... Nope, my password manager wouldn't propose my TOTP on the wrong domain. Hence, that is solvable. But if I wanted, I could still do it. Sure, I can be phished. That's my risk. But I can also log into a domain who has moved, or far more likely, use the password manager to fill out the 3rd party android app for that service.
Yea, that article did not convince me a single bit, the original article convinced me a whole lot.
Example providers?
Can’t wait for episode 3! Hopefully someone knowledgable pulls it all together into a season finale
I was using TOTP with passwords as additional security if my password manager were to be ever hacked. Passkeys are an enhancement over passwords, but they won't replace my 2FA with TOTP.
Sorry but this is the whole problem with passkey: you are forced to rely on a 3rd party to take care of your credientials, on their computers, with their software. This is like a text book example of a trap: someone set up something that looks harmless/invisible, you walk into it, and that someone now has some leverage over you.