Posted by ashergill 10/28/2025
Google does not care about FIDO or standards compliance. They care about vendor lock-in their proprietary passkey offerings allow.
To expand on that a bit, I don't have a problem with banks or whoever insisting they be stored securely. That means I don't have a problem win the inference that they don't trust me to store or even see my own keys.
What I do have a problem with is not being able to back them up. Which means I have a problem with Apple, Google or even Bitwarden handing me out a free they can take away at any time.
Fix that, so I can have store my identity(ies) at multiple providers, and I happy.
* Improving OS flows. Every passkey implementer that's also an OS gets really excited about enrolling you into their proprietary clouds, and using alternate flows to respect the users wish to use their own manager is usually hidden in confusing UI forms that don't feel consistent if you don't already know what you're doing.
* Device loss scenario is already mentioned, although more broadly speaking a lot of the reasons people get leery is because all three major providers (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are notorious for their near black box technical support. Losing access to one of these providers on its own is already enough to heavily disrupt the average person's life. Having your login details stored with them makes this even worse.
* The FIDO Alliance Is Way Too Excited About Device Attestation And I Don't Like It. Basically the FIDO Alliance's behavior around passkeys reeks of security theater and them badgering an open source password manager for daring to let users export their passkeys in the format they preferred, rather than what the FIDO Alliance wanted (which is that passkeys must always be encrypted with a password) is telling. If they are as secure as promised, it's a bad look to start threatening device attestation as a means to get people to comply with your specific idea of security. The only real barrier right now to it outright being a thing is that Apple zeroes out the field and when Apple is the only meaningful halt to that kind of attestation, something has gone very wrong.
I think passkeys are interesting, but I just flat out don't trust the FIDO Alliance with the idea. They're way too invested in big tech being good stewards of the ecosystem, which is becoming increasingly unpalatable as more and more evidence piles up that they're really bad actors on everything else. (So why should we trust them with our credentials?) The idea genuinely has value (it's literally the same kind of mechanism as SSH keys), but the hostility towards user freedom is deeply concerning and a blocker to getting people to use it. Even non-technical people seem leery of them, just because of how aggressively big tech has been pushing it.
You're kidding yourself if you think that this is something Microsoft, Apple, or Google are incentivized to solve. Microsoft is especially bad here - pushing their crappy products in Windows every chance they get. Once some marketing director gets the idea that this can improve retention in Outlook or something the UI will get more confusing and the dark patterns will get darker.
In practice, I expect someone to figure out a way to break into/bypass the OS flow entirely with a less "big tech wants your private details" solution and that's what winds up getting adoption.
And why can't we have the use of such keys enforced by an EU legislation so that all businesses allow users to login using such strings of random characters?
The world would then be a better place.
So, unlike API keys, the actual passkey is never sent anywhere out of your device. Passkeys are more like SSH keys than API keys.
One difference between SSH and the WebAuthn protocol is that the challenge identifies which key it is expecting. So the user doesn't have to explicitly select which key to use.
But a phishing site can't steal your passkey and forward it to the real site, the passkey will just not work with the phishing site if you try using it there, it's locked to the authentic domain.
What's an authentic domain?
How is my passkey locked to it?
Servers should allow multiple passkeys per user (so you can register multiple devices), but many don't.
The bigger question is... why don't we replace the login/password combination with just a string of randomly generated characters and call it a day?
Why protect these strings of random characters from users, call them passkeys and advertise them on all street corners?
Feels like a devil's plot to strip us from all the rights to our devices.
As far as I understand it, in the same way that a public/private keypair differs from a random chain of characters you are used to shoving into the "Authorization: Bearer XXXXXXX" header.
Passkeys are encrypyed so they can't be simply copied off your device.
Since then though it’s rare I’ve run into issues like that, and the login flow is much better in sites that have adopted it. I did hit an issue in GitHub last week where after logging into things with passkey it then immediately wanted me to MFA which could use the same passkey. But these things are getting rarer.
Device attestation and signing transparency logs are quite necessary for users to have visibility of where/when Passkeys have logged in. Really they should also have key ratcheting so stolen keys become useless.
- You have a strong unlock password that you don't use anywhere else
- You have a second factor set up for unlocking the vault (TPM in the device you're using, Yubikey, TOTP, etc.)
- The service you're logging into has good account recovery hygeine
The benefit, assuming those things, is that the passkey is phishing-resistant and social-engineering-resistant. If a user gets an email saying "omg, someone tried to transfer your paypal, click this link to log in", then when they try to log in with the passkey, the site the attacker is using won't be able to use the passkey (because the passkey is associated with a particular domain). Even if the user wanted to bypass this, there's specifically no way for them to extract the contents of the passkey.
That is very different from a user having their password stored in their vault. They could easily forget to check the domain, or get tricked by a very similar looking one, and copy/paste their password into the attacker's form.
Sure I could manually copy the password from the database, but in practice, this is fairly good security. It also doesn't treat the user as an always-idiot, which is a good thing in my book.
I use Bitwarden and when the password autofill doesn't work as expected my first assumption from many previous experiences is that it's because a website changed something slightly in their auth flow or a particular page has a weird redirect/embedded login scheme different than the primary login, or similar "modern" web weirdness.
So if I get phished and let my guard down just that one time due to panic, sleep deprivation, or whatever else I'm glad that it gives me a second layer of defense against me reflexively clicking a couple times to copy/paste the password manually. A passkey dropdown with "No passkeys saved for this site" would be a massive red flag and stop me in my tracks before trying to do something else stupid.
But that is after 10s of millions of dollars or more have been poured into the development of passkeys, resulting in new standard specifications, diverse implementations of password managers, etc.
Now, imagine the counterfactual world where those same dollars were devoted to improving the password infrastructure. Could we have forced the average person to always password managers with long randomized passwords? Could we have build better webspecs around password entry workflows, and forced websites to fix the issues you face? I think the answer is yes.
Against this counterfactual world, passkeys are not in practice much better.
Passkeys require some kind of password manager. That's the main benefit. The adoption problems are because a lot of users don't really understand password managers.
And it could have been done 10 years ago.
Google's password manager does nag you about bad passwords, but it's easy to ignore.
Looks like it's been around ten years since it was introduced. It doesn't seem like enough.
They could have done the same thing with passwords. They have 100s of millions of organizational users, who will do whatever corporate IT tells them to do. Microsoft can say, there is a password manager available on Windows. From now on, organizational users must use 100 entropy bit passwords. IT tells users - users must store passwords in the password manager and use the browser extension.
After three years of users resisting, everyone will give in. Same for university students, who will need it. After that the rest will adopt easily because it is the default thing to do.
> whether by phishing or exploiting the fact the passwords are weak or have been reused
1. Phishing is harder when you only ever enter your password into 1 place, and that one place is designed to be secure and consistent.
2. Much easier to have exactly 1 strong password than unique strong passwords for every website.
Is it better than a vault full of random passwords? Probably not, beyond pressuring the user into using the more secure method
> Users are largely unsure about the implications for their passkeys if they lose or break their device, as it seems their device holds the entire capability to authenticate. To trust passkeys as a replacement for the password, users need to be prepared and know what to do in the event of losing one – or all – of their devices.
- are generated securely and so can’t be guessed - can’t be phished - are unique for each website you use, so if one website is compromised it doesn’t put your other logins at risk
They certainly fucking don't.
I also have no interest in my credentials touching any cloud whatsoever.
You know what's even easier? Sending them the password.