Posted by todsacerdoti 7 days ago
People wrongly think passkeys are like Bitcoin wallets, where losing them means there's absolutely nothing you can do, your account is simply lost forever.
Losing a passkey is exactly like losing your password, which is to say, that for 99% of services, you can reset your password/passkey really easily. There's a prominent "Reset Password" button right on the login form. It sends you an email or an SMS, you click it, and it lets you reset right then and there. You can reset your passkey in exactly the same way.
It is not that easy to reset if you lose your password to your Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. They all have a bunch of factors that they use to authenticate you if you reset your password, and they don't even document which ones they use.
So, if you care about those accounts, you've got to make sure you have backup access. They all let you generate and print "backup codes" (emergency passwords) and store them in a fireproof safe or a literal bank vault. Do that!
As everybody knows, you can't store all of your passwords in a password manager. You need something outside of the password manager to login to the manager itself. That's why 1Password/LastPass is called that; you still need one last password that you keep and manage yourself.
That's true of passkeys, too. You can login to Google with passkey, but if Google is your password manager that stores your passkey, you need something else outside of Google's password manager to login to Google. Whether it's a password, a backup code, a YubiKey, whatever, you need one more thing to login to Google, ideally more than one, so you can back it up and keep it safe.
Security engineers are prioritizing preventing key copying over lockout issues, unilaterally, on literally billions of people. It improves their metrics internally, at the cost of an externality on the entire world. This kind of stuff invites odious regulation as more and more stories of lockout with no recourse surface.
And unlike passwords, there is no good provider migration story. There is a roach motel issue. Yes it is being 'worked on', but passkeys and such have been out for many years, the willful denial whenever you ask people running these standards about these issues is incredibly irritating. The fact they tend to avoid questions about this like politicians decreases trust in the motives of such standards.
I'm curious what the "good provider migration story" you're referring to here for passwords is?
Password managers by-and-large haven't agreed on a standardised interchange format for import/export - a few of them have some compatibility helpers for importing from specific popular competitors but they're all in different formats, no consistent formats.
The above goes for passkeys as it does passwords - import/export will include your passkeys - so I don't see much difference in the provider migration story.
On the other hand, the FIDO Credential Exchange Format does solve the above problem (if/when providers choose to adopt it), so passkeys are at least further along the path of creating a "good provider migration story" than passwords ever were.
Passwords right now are outright better.
And by the way, door keys could be copied.
Yes, absolutely. I have a second Google account I created and lost the password to. I can't reset it because it wants to know the exact month I opened it. I don't even know if it was 2012 or 2016, I'll never guess the month.
You can with KeePassXC, so it is a choice of the credential manager implementation. The standards people want to ban such credential managers though.
The answer to that is stuff like this:
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/recovery-cont...
People keep falsely imagining that Google is setting people up with passkey-only accounts, with no way to backup their login credentials. Gosh, wouldn't that be terrible?
That would be like 1Password letting you create a passkey-only account with no password, storing the only passkey in 1Password. The whole idea makes no sense. 1Password doesn't do that, and neither does Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. (We can all imagine them doing something that stupid, but, it turns out, they don't.)
Pre-passkeys, the most common lost-credential scenario was creating a fresh Gmail address on a new device (an Android phone) with a password and forgetting both your Google password and your password for your cellular-phone carrier (AT&T, T-Mobile, etc). Your Google password would be stored locally on your phone and in Google's cloud, but when you lose your phone and forget your passwords, no backups remain.
At that point, you're pretty much screwed. Google can't email you a reset-password link, because Gmail is your email. Google can't send you a 2FA SMS until you get a new phone with the same number, but you can't convince AT&T to do that, because they want to send a reset-password link to your email, which you don't have, or SMS to your phone, which you don't have.
(The cellular carriers don't even allow you to show government ID at a physical store. They don't allow you to take over a phone number that way, because people could then threaten/bribe a T-Mobile store representative to falsely claim that you presented valid government ID, taking over other people's accounts. If you walk into a store, they'll just put you on the phone with customer service, where they'll insist that you provide your AT&T password, or reset your password via email or SMS. If you've lost your email and your phone and all your passwords, you're completely out of luck.)
If Google allowed you to create a passkey-only account, with no SMS 2FA and no way to backup your passkey, that would be even worse.
But, luckily for all of us, they don't even allow that, and they're certainly not pushing it unilaterally on billions of people.
They work on all my (not just Apple) devices seamlessly.
I don’t need to copy them.
Non walled ecosystems are nice.
Not every provider does this correctly. Just yesterday I saw someone complaining on mastodon about their passkeys being locked and requiring a phone call to get reset.
Passkeys are exactly as resettable as passwords, which depends on your provider actually implementing things correctly.
e.g. that phone call case: some places will tell you a temporary password (over the phone) to enter next time, and then you come up with a new one when you log in. there is no equivalent flow for passkeys, because you can't enter them by hand. a site could of course build that for passkeys (like a temporary password with special UI for entering it), but literally every site with passwords can do that by default, it just needs a general admin UI which almost always exists.
(most I've encountered will email you a temp password, and in principle you could email a temp passkey too... but that doesn't work by phone / for manual entry, and is there a spec on that file format? I don't think so? in your password manager right now: is there a place to manually import a passkey for a website? half of mine don't have one for passkeys, but every single one I've ever seen has a way to manually enter a password)
Most sites/systems that are designed for security won't have such an admin UI - passwords should generally not be handled in a way where anybody other than the user is ever able to know what they are.
Most can do this. As a concrete example, phpMyAdmin has UI specifically for editing password fields: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-reset-a-wo...
If I log in to a site from my machine, and set up a passkey, but then log into that site from another machine, it'll just see no passkey present and ask for my password, yes?
A passkey is a local password on a device that could be shared through all the password manager gymnastics, but its not required as I understand it.
Passkey generated on a device can only change login flow for this one specific device. If you don’t synchronize passkey to other devices or if you do not generate passkey on other device, then login flow is different for other device. You need to enter password.
Imo it would not make any sense if it was different.
Sure I'm super secure using a passkey.... except that there's always a "try another way" option on the login screen. Which defeats the purpose.
>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
I don't think requiring an encrypted backup (with a key or secret that YOU control) by default is "preventing users from being able to export their own private keys".
And on a separate note, I fundamentally disagree for political reasons with the idea that the websites should be able to block specific passkey providers.
The github issue is quite clear about "requiring", not "by default", which is a restriction on what someone does with their own data. Particularly since AFAICT there is still no spec for data exchange over flat files. CXP is a probably-reasonable more-safe option to encourage, but it really shouldn't be the only option.
(arguably CXF only defines non-encrypted files, since it doesn't even recommend encryption options or provide a way to communicate what was used, except to say that it "MUST" encrypt or coordinate over CXP)
1. Passkey prompts asking if I want to use a phone or security key when I only have one (or neither!) registered. The UI for this gets in the way and should only ever present itself if I happen to have both kinds of devices registered.
2. Passkeys should have had the portability and flexibility that ssh keys have from the start. Making it so your grandparents can use public key cryptography and gain a significant advantage in securing their accounts in a user friendly manner should have been the priority. Seems like vendor lock-in was the goal from the start.
I disagree. It is very annoying when some service fails to show an option on the grounds that I can't use it. It makes it difficult to resolve problems. If the option is just missing, I have no way to tell whether the company doesn't provide the option, whether the company made some sort of mistake (they can't provide an email option because they lost my email), whether I made a mistake, or whether the company just has a bad UI that tries to hide the option. And don't forget the situation where I tried to google online for some help in using the UI, I found a 6 month old Reddit post showing the option, and I can't figure out if the company changed the UI in the past six months.
They should show it greyed out with a note "no key of this type registered".
Exactly. The passkey vendors state that the goal was to make phishing not just difficult but impossible. This means plaintext access to your credentials is forbidden forever, regardless of your level of expertise, and regardless of the complexity of the process to export/import them. The purpose of the so-called "secure credential exchange" is once again to prevent you from directly accessing your credentials. You can go from one passkey vendor to another, but you're always locked in to one passkey vendor or another.
Any credential system that makes it impossible to write something down on a piece of paper, take it to a new computer, and login to a website is just a gateway to vendor lock-in. You can manually manage your own ssh keys but for some reason not your passkeys.
As an Apple Mac user, what annoys me the most is that the use of passkeys in Safari requires iCloud Keychain, which of course requires iCloud and an Apple Account. [EDIT: Obviously I'm talking about built-in support. I'm well aware of third-party software, so everyone can stop replying to this now, please!] You can't do local-only passkeys, not even if you take responsibility for backing up your own Mac.
The passkey vendors took some good theoretical ideas, such as site-specific credentials and public-key cryptography, and totally mangled the implementation, making it hostile to everyone except themselves.
This is not true - browsers including Safari support passkeys managed by third-party password managers.
I'm using 1Password with browser extensions for Safari and Chrome on macOS and iOS and it works seamlessly with my passkeys, which are not stored in iCloud Keychain.
> you're always locked in to one passkey vendor or another.
This will change: https://1password.com/blog/fido-alliance-import-export-passk...
I think you know what I meant and are just being pedantic here for no good reason.
Do you think I'm unaware of 1Password? I don't want to use 1Password any more than I want to use iCloud Keychain.
Technically, pendantically, Safari "supports" anything that third-party Safari extensions support. I'm a Safari extension developer myself. But this is totally different from how Safari supports the use of passwords, which is all built in, requires no third-party software, can be local-only, allows plaintext export/import, etc.
> This will change: https://1password.com/blog/fido-alliance-import-export-passk...
This is literally what I meant by the so-called "secure credential exchange" in my previous comment.
1. https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxf-v1.0-ps-20250814.html#...
[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
Someone could develop a "passkey export tool" purely for the purpose of doing credential exchange then local export.
Or are you saying the credential exchange process itself could block providers?
Not sure how stating that my (an individual) opinions on a topic are evolving is interpreted as "threatened the KeypassXC developers".
If you've been following along, you'll have seen that I am actually one of the biggest advocates of the open passkey ecosystem, and have been working really hard to make sure all credential managers have a level playing field.
Always happy to chat directly if you have concerns!
The biggest advocates of an open ecosystem say attestation should be removed and no one should adopt Passkeys before. Is this your position now?
The concerns were clear I thought. I would be happy to discuss this publicly.
Avoid weasel words please. Is it possible in theory to use attestation or any other Passkeys feature ever to prevent a user to use any software they chose with any service they chose?
But in reality, the people who actually work on these standards within the FIDO alliance do not want a world where every website/service makes arbitrary decisions on which password managers are allowed. That would be a nightmare.
But again, kicking the can down the road.
Care to cite this statement?
> As an Apple Mac user, what annoys me the most is that the use of passkeys in Safari requires iCloud Keychain, which of course requires iCloud and an Apple Account. You can't do local-only passkeys, not even if you take responsibility for backing up your own Mac.
You can use any credential manager you choose. You don't have to use Apple Passwords / iCloud Keychain.
Yes, literally from you: "Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407 Also, "You absolutely should be preventing users from being able to copy a private key!"
> You can use any credential manager you choose. You don't have to use Apple Passwords / iCloud Keychain.
But I want to use Apple Passwords. And I do use Apple Passwords for passwords.
What you're saying, in contrast, is that in order to use passkeys, I would be forced to change how I currently store credentials, which is not in iCloud. "You can choose any method you like, except the one you currently like" is a pernicious interpretation of "choice".
> But I want to use Apple Passwords.
You're choosing to use an app that doesn't meet your needs, when there are numerous apps out there that do meet your needs. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to solve that for you.
"You absolutely should be preventing users from being able to copy a private key!" is the 8th post in the discussion.
Do you stand by these words, or are you now repudiating them?
> You're choosing to use an app that doesn't meet your needs
I am using an app that meets my needs. I don't need passkeys. It's just other people telling me that I need passkeys.
Years and years of security incidents with consumer data show that this is a really bad idea.
At minimum, a credential manager distributed for wide use should encrypt exported/copied keys with a user selected secret or user generated key.
It feels like this stated minimum is not your actual minimum.
Consider for example a macOS user keychain. The keychain is encrypted on disk with a user-selected password. But once you unlock the keychain with the password, you can copy and paste passwords in clear text. The keychain is not a black hole where nothing ever escapes. And I have no objection to this setup; in fact it's my current setup.
So when you say copy and paste of passkeys in clear text is not a good idea, there's nothing inherent to encrypting credentials with a user key that prevents such copy and paste. There would have to be some additional restriction.
What should happen if the developers refuse to enforce this?
>> There is no passkey certification process
> This is currently being defined and is almost complete.
>> no signed stamp of approval from on high
> see above. Once certification and attestation goes live, there will be a minimum functional and security bar for providers.
Will I always be able to use any credential manager of my choice? Any naturally also includes software that I might have written myself. And would you be in support of an ecosystem where RPs might block my implementation based on my AAGUID?
[0] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406#iss...
But I'll respond.
> Will I always be able to use any credential manager of my choice? Any naturally also includes software that I might have written myself. And would you be in support of an ecosystem where RPs might block my implementation based on my AAGUID?
If a website were to block your custom software's AAGUID for some reason, you can change your AAGUID.
AAGUIDs in the consumer passkey ecosystem are used to name your credential manager in account settings so you remember where you saved your passkey.
> You can use any credential manager you choose.
Which I would be careful with. I can use any authenticator that the RP accepts. I could totally see a future where banks only allow certain authenticators (Apple/Google) and enforce this through AAGUID or even attStmt. Similar to the Google Play Protect situation.
At that point, those banks/services would enforce vendor lock-in on me. The reality would be: I can use iOS or Android, but not a FOSS implementation. This restriction is not possible with old-school passwords.
Completely untrue, Safari on both Mac and iOS supports third-party password managers for both traditional passwords and passkeys.
I’ll accept that the attestation parts of the protocol may have had some ulterior motives (though I’m skeptical), but not having to reveal your credential to the verifying party is the entire benefit of passkeys and hugely important to stop phishing. I think it’s disingenuous to argue that this is somehow unnecessary.
I think you misunderstood what I was talking about. The credential exchange protocol is for exporting passkeys from one credentials manager and importing them into another credentials manager. It has nothing to do with the relying party.
For the general public, they already rely on either Google or Apple for pretty much all of their digital life. Nothing wrong with extending this to passkeys, it's convenient and makes sense for them.
I don't want to use a Yubikey. It's a pain in the butt. I just want to use my Mac, with no more damn dongles.
Keepass is a vendor, and one who doesn't even have a Safari extension.
> Nothing wrong with extending this to passkeys, it's convenient and makes sense for them.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with extending this to passkeys. The problem is the lock-in, e.g., Safari requires iCloud keychain for passkeys, but not for passwords. And there is no plaintext export/import, unlike with passwords.
Nobody can convince me that passkeys are good when I buy a Mac and use the built-in Safari but can't even use passkeys to log in to websites unless I give my passkeys to a cloud sync service or have to install some third-party "solution" (for a problem that should not exist in the first place). That experience is so much worse than passwords.
No, this is a passkeys problem. Safari does not force lock-in of passwords.
Why in the world would I want to ditch my web browser just to use passkeys? I'd rather ditch passkeys.
Repeating this doesn’t make it true. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...
All of the 3rd party credential managers I’ve used that support passkeys work with safari, and through the APIs that Apple offers the credential managers you can even pick your default CM and never think about iCloud again…
I've already addressed this pedantry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304137
A tech-savvy relative of such a user should help them generate rescue codes, write them on a piece of paper, and store them along with all other important documents. Ideally the paper should also read: "Call me before using any of these codes! <phone number>."
a key based approach is great. Knowing (the passphrase) and Having (the key) is a good way to authenticate.
A passkey basically offloads user identification to the OS (especially a mobile OS). It should not be the only way to identify though.
An ssh-style key + password is fine. A username + password + TOTP should also be fine. But 99.9% of passwords should be in a password manager anyway.
Rescue codes should always be generated and written down when activating a passkey or similar, but this requires certain discipline, some feeling of importance. And many web sites that require registration don't seem important for users, especially one-time users. What makes sense for your Google account, or your bank account, feels like too much ceremony for a low-stakes login like a random online store; losing a login to it does not feel like a big loss to many people.
Until service providers are no longer allowed to:
1) force the type of passkey stores used (e.g. hardware vs software) when I am providing the passkey store
2) force me to MFA (e.g. forcing touch ID, entering pin or unlock password, etc) when attempting to use a passkey
Which probably looks a lot like a password.
(2) I understand you don't like the user experience. But to make a technical clarification: requiring a user action to prove there's a human involved in the login action (e.g. by clicking a button in UI or requiring Touch ID) does not necessarily mean there's another factor involved at all (MFA). What you are describing is more of a "liveness check" than a separate factor/separate credential.
(1) is already true today. There is no way for services to enforce whether a passkey is stored in software or hardware.
(2) I understand you don't like the user experience
If he can't get his account back in any reasonable amount of time what chance do I have?
(I see I missed a big HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 - 1038 comments)
It would be nice if you could use some legal apparatus to ratchet these agreements into a trust. Corps would hate it though, so it will probably be illegal to do.
The government can, though. I’m not sure if there’s any existing laws pertaining to transfer of or access to general accounts after death (as opposed to bank accounts which I’m pretty sure there are laws about).
My will says that my executor can access my accounts which alleviates Apple from legal risk if they do grant access but I’m pretty sure they are not obligated to do so.
It was rather frustrating to watch: "You're a huge fan of X but don't know how X works?"
For example, two people can't make a contract between them that gives one the right to visit the other in a hospital, nor the right to make medical-care/power-of-attorney decisions. You also can't contract-away the guardianship (or ownership) of children, etc.
I wrote about it here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-happens-to-your-online-ac...
If someone passes away, their family members can use the Emergency Kit to gain access to and use all their credentials - including their passkeys.
(The Emergency Kit also allows you to recover your data in the event that you forget your master passphrase or lose all your devices.)
Whatever process a vendor requires someone to go through in order to gain access to someone's account when they pass away remains the same whether the user previously used a password or a passkey to login.
Are you aware of any vendor that actually does have differing policies based on the account's login credential type? I'm not aware of any.
The only one who can lock me out of my relationship with e.g. HN is HN.
With passkeys:
Now I can be locked out by HN or by the passkey provider.
Sure I could use a local passkey provider, but the protocol provides a way for the site to enforce a whitelist of passkey providers, so it's not clear that would be an option. Particularly for businesses like banks which tend to adopt an approach of "if a security restriction is possible, it should be applied". Or even just the typical tech PM perspective of "we want to include logos for the log in with X, and I think more than 5 logos is ugly so let's just whitelist Lastpass, 1password, Google, Microsoft and apple and be done with it"
If I want to move a passkey out of my Apple keychain, last I heard the answer is to just make a new passkey. The important part of the secret is 100% under their control. It makes me very squeamish
I don't want a passkey on my logins but there is no way to disable this prompt on the 3 websites that constantly annoy me for them.
Drives me batty. The company I work for is already paying you for the service I'm using. We use SSO for EVERYTHING, I've already 2FA Authenticated the login, and even if I set up a passkey I will still have to 2FA the login.
I don't use these sites in any personal capacity, and I would never use a site that harasses me in any way if I was not absolutely required to in order to earn a paycheck.
You're not going to get any money out of me, why are you torturing me?
Stop the insanity.
Succumbing to lock-in can smooth some (but not all) rough edges and creates it's own restrictions and risks.
TOTP for the win --- it's the simpler practical alternative.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lazyotp/eoihmklnjkn...
If you had multiple devices set up on the site (each site must have done this individually), you just use a different device.
If you had synced your passkeys somewhere (note that the spec allows sites to block this, though I'm not aware of any actually doing so), you sync them to the new thing and log in normally.
If you did none of those, it's gone forever. Do the account recovery process, if one exists.
So it degrades to equal or worse than passwords in all cases (which cannot block backups or syncing, and you can enter them individually by hand so you're not exposing all your passwords to the device, and you can communicate them over the phone or in writing), for device loss purposes.
Restoring access in this scenario is imo one of their worst qualities.
I have yet to see any solid, significant evidence that passkeys are materially more secure than a random 32-character password + TOTP 2FA.
If a site or app refuses to let me create my own login and forces me to use a provider, I’m not going to be a customer under any circumstances.
If a site or app refuses to let me use a password+TOTP combination (as in, it forces passkeys), I am similarly out.
That’s not to say I don’t use passkeys. I have them on my Microsoft accounts, for one. But that is only after I have fully set up the account, and that the account plays very nice with the Microsoft Authenticator app, even going so far as to do challenge-response auth in coordination with the app, and plumping TOTP up to 8 characters.
Will I switch to passkeys elsewhere? Not for some time to come. My passwords make use of the entire two-byte UTF-8 character set, in that less than ½ of all characters typically generated can be found on a U.S. keyboard. So long as websites don’t restrict password length to moronically short values, a 32-character password with 2,048 possibilities for every character ought to be reasonably difficult to crack.
And then, of course, comes TOTP 2FA.
I think the main selling point of passkeys is their ability to prevent phishing.
A 32-character password + TOTP can still be entered on a phishing website, e.g. if you happen to follow a fabricated link. With passkeys, this is not possible by design.
…How? The password manager only permits exact links. If the URL does not have the UTF-8-identical characters to the correct url - at which time, IT IS the correct URL - it will simply not populate the username and password fields.
Not more secure, but some sites mandate email/SMS 2FA, don't support TOTP, and have added passkey support.
For these sites, using passkeys is materially more convenient than copying 2FA codes from email/SMS.
Which should be made illegal on a national/international level.
The only possible reason for that is sheer laziness or malicious ignorance. Full stop, end of story
And I also include eMailed login links and eMailed 2FA in with that determination. Any secure login attribute that gets transmitted over eMail or SMS should be illegal. Password reset links, only. And vendor-locked/vendor-specific apps as the only 2FA path should also be illegal. TOTP should be a fully open system, letting anyone use any legitimate provider or app.
Yeah, let’s just say I have some pretty strong opinions.