Posted by emadda 12/22/2025
I love passkeys, but they're still kinda hard to use. There's several sites that wont let you enroll multiple ones and it's easy for systems to step on each other like the aforementioned experience.
The problem is fallback. All my banking apps have SMS OTP fallbacks and that's no better than having only SMS OTP. If you're building these systems make sure you have good fallbacks. What matters in design is not so much how well it works when things go right but how well it works when things go wrong. With security you really cannot ignore edge cases
The easier it is to do things, like use another channel, the harder it is to keep secure.
The easier it is to keep secure, the harder it is to use.
Apple wants you to use iCloud passkeys, Microsoft wants you to use Microsoft Account passkeys, Google wants you to use Google passkeys. Even if you have a dedicated USB device plugged in, browsers keep defaulting to the cloud accounts.
Bitwarden's approach is to simply hijack the passkey request before the browser can respond and throw itself front and center. It's a terrible hack but it works on every browser at the very least.
If these companies cared about their users more than they cared about throwing up walled gardens, they wouldn't put a USB key behind "Choose another method" -> "Dedicated device" -> "Security key" -> "Confirm" while offering one-click login with their cloud account. And they would offer a proper API for third party applications to integrate into the native passkey storage.
I've resigned to registering a passkey into all of my providers and just letting the most platform native option win for now.
Every login was the same: fails -> try again or try different method -> list of methods (including "security key") -> ok -> tap security key -> ok
It would not let me set the key as the default and there were two unnecessary clicks. The box literally only had a single button (besides the standard x on the window)! It was absolutely infuriating.
I'm with you. I don't believe these companies are actually trying to create the best solutions. And you can absolutely see that when you try to move from one ecosystem to another.
Look at my problem again and now consider had I been using my iCloud key and wanted to login from my Linux machine. It literally wouldn't be possible!
In practice we don't actually want the best security though. We frequently make concessions. I mean with my bank I don't want "the best" security. If I lose my credentials I don't want to go broke. If my credentials get hacked (especially if hacked by no fault of my own!) I want that money recovered. These things would not be possible with "the best" security.
In fact, in a different interpretation I would call those paths less secure. Ability to recover is a security feature just as much as it's not.
Both security and privacy do not have unique all encompassing solutions. They are dependent upon the threat model.
Importantly when designing things you have to understand modes of failure. When you design a bridge you design it to fail in certain ways because when/if it fails you want it to do so in the safest possible way. Why does this pattern of thinking not also apply here? It seems just as critical here! In physical security you also have to design things for both fail open and fail closed. You don't want you always fail close, doing so gets people killed! So why is the thinking different in software?
Not to mention:
How do I login from my Linux machine if I'm only using my iCloud key?
Your logic would lock me into the apple ecosystem forever and that's a worse security setting than anything else we discussed. Apple decides to become evil and I'm just fucked. Or swap Apple with Microsoft who is actively demonstrating that transition
In terms of security, yes. But not in terms of convenience.
I've decided to stop adding new ones. I'll just OTP 2FA. It's simple, reliable, and I can keep it in Bitwarden safely.
Safari on iOS can store and use passkeys from any app that implements the right system API, including the default Apple Passwords but also Bitwarden and Chrome.
For desktop, you can either use a browser extension provided by some password managers (such as Bitwarden), or if you're on a Mac, Safari and Chrome can access passkeys from other apps similarly to on iOS (but not as many providers support this API on Mac as on iOS, and in particular Bitwarden doesn't, so you'd have to use the extension for that).
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-sh...
I also uploaded my passport to Delta to make traveling to both Costa Rica and London faster this year.
https://www.delta.com/us/en/travel-planning-center/know-befo...
I've never seen a legitimate use case where I need to prove my identity to use a website anyways.
And the more this behavior is normalized, the easier it is for governments to make it illegal for any site to not demand users' government-registered identities.
Overall it’s not terrible but I think these edge cases are going to keep biting people and need to be addressed in some way. And yes I understand that I could use a Yubikey or Bitwarden or some such but the point was that I wanted to see how this flow works for “normal” users who just use the iCloud Keychain and the experience leaves something to be desired.
> So if I initially create an account from my MacBook and the passkey gets listed as “MacBook”, I then go to log in from my iPhone and it still uses the “MacBook” passkey because of iCloud sync. But this is confusing because I cannot have an iPhone key.
This is why I strongly prefer to not use OSX passkeys. How the fuck am I supposed to login on my nix machines if you only allow me to enroll one passkey?!
But FWIW, I have the least friction with Linux. But that's more that Windows and Apple have their walled gardens and that's where the friction comes from, though in different ways.
The messed up thing is that the simplest backup option is a magic login link which is obviously less secure. Also you cannot sink a passkey between platforms unless you use a third party Authenticator so you have to have a backup method of some sort even if not for recovery reasons.
My only feedback is about the Quickstart of passkeybot, "feed this example into a good LLM with these instructions". I undeerstand the idea, but I was a bit shocked that the first time I see these sort of instructions is for an auth framework.
I am in the middle of writing a passkey-driven server dashboard app (native SwiftUI app, with a small server component).
In the future, I would like to use passkeys as much as possible, but they do present a bit more friction to users than Sign in with Apple. When I was initially learning them I wrote this up: https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/
[1] Spec author quote: "To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
[2] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
[3] https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shatt...
I personally think the ability to export+import passkeys is a good thing from a backup point of view, but he's not wrong in suggesting that companies actually using the high security features of passkeys will eventually block software implementations like these.
This isn't about vendor lock-in. Nobody is asking for KeepassXC to remove passkey support. This is about security software implementing an API and not fulfilling the expectations that come with such an implementation. To quote the comment you linked:
> That's fine. Let determined people do that, but don't make it easy for a user to be tricked into handing over all of their credentials in clear text.
> personally think the ability to export+import passkeys is a good thing from a backup point of view
It's not a "good thing," it's absolutely critical. If I can't back up my credentials in a location that I trust, then it's not an acceptable login method. What happens if my PC goes down and I couldn't export my data? I just can't log in anywhere? KeePassXC lets me do that, but the spec authors think it's appropriate to ban me for using it because it lets me manage my own data. That's bonkers.
> What happens if my PC goes down and I couldn't export my data? I just can't log in anywhere?
Then you follow the procedure you would follow for when you'd forget your password. Probably a password reset through email, maybe calling customer support. Or if you have it set up, you could use the passkey set up on your phone or Yubikey or whatever to log in and create a new password on your new PC.
Passkeys aren't passwords, that's the whole point. It's modelled after the "something you have" factor, not "something you know". If you're finding workarounds to violate the security design, you're not gaining any advantage by using passkeys. Just use a password if you want to use a password.
The trouble is, if websites are allowed/encouraged to ban clients, then the advantages you're talking about come with the downside of hard-tying yourself to one of 3 US-based Big Tech companies, because those will be the only ones who will ship clients declared "secure." That's not a trade-off I'm willing to make for something as critical as my service logins. You can already see this happening, almost every article talking about passkeys assumes you're logging in with an Apple, Google, or Microsoft device.
> Then you follow the procedure you would follow for when you'd forget your password. Probably a password reset through email, maybe calling customer support.
This is a downgrade from passwords (and exportable passkeys), where I can just restore it from a backup.
> Just use a password if you want to use a password.
Yeah, that's what I plan to keep doing, unfortunately. What I'm worried about is a password-less future where that's no longer an option and we all have to submit to using one of Android, iOS, or Windows to log in to everything because those are the only clients that can be trusted(TM) to handle the user's data as the big tech companies and governments desire it to be handled. This is a dark future.
Remote attestation is evil.
I read as much about it from the official sources as I could about a year ago, so I might be wrong here. From what I remember even though no specific mention of Android or iOS attestation was made, a "strong" form of 2FA is needed. Stronger than TOTP.
In my country most banks I talked with require a mobile app for 2FA even if you're logging in from a desktop browser. I haven't (and will not) install a banking app on my phone, so I'm not sure if it would work if the phone doesn't pass the attestation (e.g., Play Integrity on Android). I wanted to install the app in an AOSP VM, but no bank would even send me the apk file - they all want me to download it from Google for some reason.
Another option was to pay for a hardware device from a third-party company.
I was lucky that one bank still uses SMS 2FA. It's weaker than TOTP (depending on your threat model, I guess), but I prefer it.
My other option is either to:
* have a smartphone;
* have an "approved" OS from an American company;
* have an account with said American company so I can download the app from the company's repository;
* run closed source software on my smartphone.
or to
* pay for a USB device from a third-party company;
* that barely works with Linux;
* that requires a closed source program to run;
* that doesn't work with VMs and troubleshooting was a pain (I tried).
What I want is to use TOTP. I would actually store the secret on another device, as I'm not opposed to the idea of 2FA in general. And I would be fine if my money were drained as a result of me being hacked. If I had millions in my account, I could just use a separate computer only for the banking, but still a computer I chose.
Online banking (a superset of "mobile" banking) is very important for a person to have in order to participate in society. The ability to choose what hardware and software to use is also very important. The ability to not associate oneself with third-party companies, to accept their ToS and to pay them money is also very important. Therefore, I think those things should be my rights. I'm not complaining about a gym or a pizza place requiring a mobile app here, after all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_customer_authentication
MFA is more secure: you combine multiple factors of authentication. You could do password + passkey, password + TOTP token (assuming such tokens are not exportable either), password + biometrics, passkey + biometrics, even TOTP + biometrics would be MFA.
I don't think anyone proposes replacing MFA with passkeys, most proponents are proposing replacing passwords with passkeys.
A second question is "is MFA still necessary when using passkeys", as passkeys are generally more secure than the Welcome1234! type passwords most people use. I'd argue that for quite a few non-critical services, it wouldn't be. More and more services have started requiring 2FA because the damage of accepting passwords alone was too great, and with passkeys I don't believe the same damage would occur.
It'd still be a good to offer the option. In fact, I think passwords should be offered as a second option; combining passkeys with something like TOTP would be close to useless as the same thing you use to validate the passkey probably also generates the TOTP codes.
Amazon actually does MFA with passkeys: you can log in with a passkey but it'll still ask you for a TOTP code. I'd rather combine password and passkey, but at least they're not completely turning off the additional layer of security.
The threat he relayed was more serious than the threat he made. But it is a threat when a person with influence suggests they may support a punishment.
> If you promise to store a key in a non-exportable format
There was no such promise. The people who wish Passkeys to replace passwords did not demand it yet even.
The specification states otherwise: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/
A credential private key is the private key portion of a credential key pair. The credential private key is bound to a particular authenticator - its managing authenticator - and is expected to never be exposed to any other party, not even to the owner of the authenticator.1) that they're enforcing these specs for technical reasons, not because they want vendor lock-in
2) a result of these decisions in the long term is vendor lock-in
I think we're verrry slowly inching toward shedding all the security nerd self-indulgences and getting to what I think is the eventual endgame which PassKeys are just keys and ultimately a fairly user friendly way of getting people to use a password manager without it feeling like one. All the other features seem like noise.
No, that is absolutely not the point. The points of using pub/priv keys for asymmetric auth instead of passwords (symmetric, manually generated auth) are:
- Server-side (ie, central point) hacks no longer matter an iota from a user auth pov. No more having to worry about reuse anywhere else, about going around changing passwords, nada, because the server simply doesn't have anything that can be used for auth anymore at all. No more concerns about whether they're storing it with the right hash functions or whatever, they could publish all the public keys in plain text and it'd be irrelevant. This fantastically changes the economics of attacks, since now instead of hacking one place and getting thousands/millions/hundreds of millions of credentials you'd have to hack every single separate client.
- As a practical matter, the process means eliminating the whole ancient hodgepodge of password requirements (often outright anti-security) and bad practices and manual generation work. Everything gets standardized on something that will always be random, unique, and secure.
And that should be it. That's the point and the value, always was. The only goal should be to put a nice UX and universal standard around. But of course, modern enshittified tech being enshittified, they had to shove in a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit garbage like what you're talking about.
My apologies to GP if it came across as too personally aggro, I did mention the corps and their walled gardens to try to be clear on the focus, but the situation does really make me absolutely furious and also truly sad. This should have been such a simple, universal win/win/win that made everything better for everyone. But as you say:
>and so strongly supported by the spec authors and the passkey community, that it's hard to see it as unintentional. It completely poisons the technology, and that sucks because I really do want to use it.
Yeah, 110%. I'm one of the very few who actually tried to use certificates for web authentication back in the 00s, and it did work pretty darn well surprisingly! There were even a few commercial web services that tried it out like the now defunct StartSSL. It was just the whole flow around it was too clunky for regular people and needed some additional standardization and polish. If only the right catalyst had happened to make it a priority in the 2000s it might well have been done in a lasting good way that'd then be too sticky and entrenched to fuck with now. It's depressing to see it being hijacked and poisoned like it has been :(.
As stated by the spec authors on KeePassXC's bug tracker, open source software may be modified by the user, so cannot be trusted. The passkey proposal is for all of your keys to be managed by proprietary software validated by your phone or your computer's TPM module. That means one of three big, US-based tech companies will control all of the world's login data. Those 3 companies are all currently involved in the largest fascist-taint-tongue-polishing in US history, and we want to hand them control over the world's logins. That's a much, much bigger risk than some users doing something stupid.
The spec needs to be written with the assumption that the user's private keystore may be hostile to the user's own interests, because in the real world, it is. It needs to be written to mitigate damage to the user from a hostile keystore. Instead, the spec places total trust in the keystore. This is a fatal error.
But the existence of attestation means Apple could at any time in the future make attestation on by default and suddenly our devices control our secrets more than we do.
Is that "cannot be extracted" from JS only, or is this an actual device-locked, TPM/SEP-bound key like passkeys?
If it is, it seems kind of like the buried lede to me that there is a browser API that lets any website built its own completely unstandardized quasi-passkey system and lock the key to the current device.
And likewise you as the app vendor can know the key was generated, and that it works, but you can't[1] know that it's actually locked to a device or that it's non-exportable. You could be running in a virtualized environment that logged everything.
Basically it's not really that useful. Which is sort of true for security hardware in general. It's great for the stuff the device vendors have wired up (which amounts to "secured boot", "identifying specific known devices" and "validating human user biometrics on a secured device"), but not really extensible in the way you'd want it to be.
[1] Within the bounds of this particular API, anyway. There may be some form of vendor signing you can use to e.g. verify that it was done on iOS or ChromeOS or some other fully-secured platform. I honestly don't know.
the capability is there, but it would he massively inconvenient, since it requires a lot of lockdown
might be the next generation of anti-cheats though
There's no direct remote attestation implementation for passkeys yet, but remote attestation for web browsers has been around for a few years now.
May it always remain niche.
A world in which open source browsers are unusable for most people and new entries to the browser market are all but impossible sounds terrible.
linux is open-source and a very common attestation target
GrapheneOS supports attestation. GrapheneOS even provides the sort of security guarantees that would make risk management types at banks happy, but it isn't popular enough for them to be motivated to support it as an attestation target.
Now imagine it was practical for websites to require attestation from browsers. How likely do you think it that all the major services would accept anything other than Chrome, Safari, and Edge?
Just to be clear, the PKCE secret can be the same for each initiation, but in the end its goal is to ensure that the first request matches with the last one. And yes, there is "plain" PKCE method but that is just for testing. SHA256 is the default one used to obfuscate the secret.
Of course if you trust the client (no bad browser extensions, updated browser) and have good TLS settings and no MITM risk and make sure the your IDs are single-use then it seems like that should be fine.
The code_challenge == sha256(code_verifier). You will share the code_challenge at the start of the flow.
I run an authentication server and requiring PKCE allows me to make sure that XSS protection is handled for all clients.
I guess it's probably not tracking tons of IDs like tracking packet state through a network device.
Even a few million (max) UUIDv4 is probably fine then, yeah?
start
(1) Copy / paste example_http_server into your LLM of choice (use a paid/good model). (2) Prompt: Implement the HTTP handlers here for my project,..
Um, no? How about you give me real instructions on how to do it? I’m not going to delegate a security-critical task to an LLM. And since I need to review it carefully myself anyway, I might as well write it all by hand, right? Like, the whole premise is I just need to implement a couple of webhooks.
This is like those "contact your system admin" error messages. I am the system admin!
"Hey chat bot friendo, where's the nearest hand-written 'help wanted' sign in the door of a coffee shop? I need a new career path"
The LLM is only for converting the JS based example code into your language X and HTTP framework Y (instead of giving example code for every combination of X and Y).
The standard implementation is in a single file `http_server.ts`, which is around 200 lines of well commented code, with important logic commented (around 5 lines). The example code can be run locally with a few commands.
The repo also contains a sequence diagram [1], a description of the HTTP handlers needed [2], and a live demo [3] where you can see the request/responses.
Thanks for your feedback I have made this clearer in the readme.
- [1] https://github.com/emadda/passkeybot/tree/master?tab=readme-...
- [2] https://github.com/emadda/passkeybot/tree/master?tab=readme-...
- [3] https://demo.enzom.dev/