Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them
(nonfunctional.substack.com)
from shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 12 Oct 04:40
https://lemmy.ml/post/53890731
from shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 12 Oct 04:40
https://lemmy.ml/post/53890731
cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1390699
threaded - newest
Never used. Each time a website asks me if I want to create one I have this uneasy feeling of not actually owning the key.
That is the issue of passkeys. They are hard to understand and without understanding there can be no trust.
You’re not wrong to have that feeling.
Where is the passkey saved? Can I take it out and back it up? Can I use it on another device, running a completely different OS? If I lose this device the passkey is on, what happens?
The answers to most of these is negative.
I am using Bitwarden client with self-hosted vaultwarden and answers to all of those are: my server, yes, yes, if I lose all my devices and the server at the same time I lose access to my passkeys, and all my passwords for that matter. If I have my server, or at least one of my other devices, they are all on my device.
TIL what passkeys are. Thx for sharing.
No I won’t. All my passwords are something like
I0!2b6KJ!eA04WiJ&&MFToCQ7CN*4mvband each is used for only one thing because I’ve been using a password manager for over a decade.I don’t think any service allows passwords that long
the vast majority of mine are +50 characters - you are just wrong. the services which strictly limit the length are rare and their security is suspect since they should be hashing your input anyway
Didn’t know that. I stand corrected
I mean it’s probably a good idea to have some kind of limit in place, because you really don’t want to deal with attackers trying to transfer megabytes worth of text in the password field and triggering an OOM on your end. But this limit should still be pretty high ofc.
for sure, but limiting it under 64 (the length of a sha256 hash) isn’t ideal at all
Most do. Source: I usually use passwords that long.
Maybe 1 in 10 don’t, and I find that annoying since 32 characters containing only lowercase real words and spaces has several times as much entropy as 8 characters of random mixed case letters, numbers, and symbols.
I default to using 128 characters because that’s the max for the password generator I use. A surprising amount of accounts are OK with that, like more often than not. I have pared accounts down massively since using a password manager though, and use privacy respecting services when possible, so I may be self selecting here.
Limiting password length is a red flag they are storing your password in plaintext. I’d be wary of using any service like that
I switched to using a password manager last year that scrambles all of my passwords like how you describe, and hot damn is it nice, both in terms of security and convenience.
lemmy.ca/comment/25786053
I’ve always thought they were a really bad idea. It puts everything into a “setting you have” factor and removes the “something you know as well as the need to match the factor to a username. And if the site is hacked, they can get a lot of information about how the passkeys are generated even if they don’t get access to secure info. It just simplifies the ability to hack a random account in many ways if not a specific one.
I evaluate it based on that they replace passwords. Password is shared secret, which is bad. Passkeys are public-private cryptography, which is good. Passwords has to be stored in a password database and your username is gonna be stored alongside it, so you might as well store your passkeys there istead. Passkeys have the added benefit of being possible to store in an authenticators secure storage, like a security key. I see no real downsides, relatively speaking. Passwords that are created by humans, those not using pw managers, are gonna be bad.
With my security key, using FIDO2, i have to have the key, touch the key and enter a PIN. My key is never exposed, signatures happen on device. It’s neat!
Problem is passkey generation, expiration logic, etc., is often not well protected, so if a hacker is able to get it, they may not be able to target a specific account, but they can target random accounts with semi-bruteforce since there’s no username to limit tries against or lock the account if there’s too many tries. Just use a botnet and start throwing probable keys at it and you’re likely to get a few.
Also, with a password repository, I protect that as exceptionally as I can, but I can always change my passwords and would do so of that was compromised. But I’m not talking about the passkeys of an individual being stolen, I’m talking about a compromised site having very little way of determining of a hacker has gotten enough information to narrow brute forcing down to a relatively manageable level with a botnet and using that to access random accounts for personal information scraping. And the user may have no idea it’s happened to them since the bad tries never were associated with any login.
See I bought a couple of yubikeys, but have zero passkeys becuase I’ve yet to encounter any service that lets me choose to store their passkey on said yubikeys. How do you do it?
Seems to me that if I could tie them to yubikeys (ideally on two keys), remote attestation wouldn’t risk me allowing any third party to assert influence or control over my choices of technology - is that right?
Amazon is probably the most visible example of trying to create passkeys all the damn time, but it never offers any user choice about where this passkey would be (my best guess is that its on the computer and tied somehow to my login). I’d happily use passkeys with yubikey, but I’m not willing to set up a different passkey on each computing device I use. Thatś a housekeeping/maintenance headache I dont want or need and it would be made all but impossible if I give up visibility and control over what devices are ‘authorised’ and how.
I hate to think how many people have inadvertently set up passkeys on devices that they rarely use.
If the site supports passkeys, the site asks the browsers WebAuthn API to create a passkey. From there it’s up to the browser where the passkey ends up. In firefox, for example, it tries my security keys first, and I can choose which one by touching it. If you use a password manager, like KeepassXC, you install an extension to hijack this process, so all passkeys end up in the password database.
Attestation on a security key just means the firmware on the key has to be signed. So in theory, you can’t use something like the ‘Solokey hacker’. When sites ask for information on my keys I ususally choose to block it in the browser. That has not been a problem so far. I allways register two separate keys for each service and they are fully mobile. A security key you could not bring with you would be pointless.
I have amazon passkeys on my security keys. I didn’t notice anything unusual with the registration process.
All the sites I’ve encountered have allowed me to use my security keys. Google had some dark pattern that made it confusing to set up and Discord does not allow passkeys for login, so the ones they let me create ended up undiscoverable passkeys, only for 2fa. The only site my solokey didn’t work so far is l1t forum. I don’t know why. but I doubt they require an attested device.
I use a NFC key for my phone.
I would not accept a device bound passkey. Nor would I let a third party, like Google, manage them for me.
If you wanna try it out; use webauthn.io
This is why I only use passkeys that are stored in my self hosted vault warden. As long as you don’t create passkeys locked to a vendor’s manager, I don’t see any reason to avoid them.
The Bitwarden client is so bad though. I seem to only be able to use the passkey on the specific device I saved it in.
I’ve experimented with this and haven’t had a problem. However, I was using the open source fork Vaultwarden and only the browser extension(s).
I am using the same combination, but the passkeys do not persist between different browsers
In the bitwarden browser extension, settings -> autofill -> “make bitwarden your default password manager”
Is this checked?
I also set a “pin” in settings -> account security -> “unlock with pin”.
(After reading the article: maybe passkey requires bitwarden to be “more secure” - I dunno)
Hmm I haven’t had that issue, I have a lot of passkeys saved and they sync fine and are usable in Firefox on my laptop as well as with apps on my pixel 5 running lineage. I have noticed that occasionally an app will refuse to give me the option to create a passkey in bitwarden, but I just skip those and I haven’t noticed that issue in a while.
Have you checked whether the site entry shows the passkey on both devices? On mine it’ll say “passkey created …” on both devices in the vault.
The main problem is that there’s no place to view my passkeys like there is for passwords for TOTP (according to my searching and their website, anyway)
In vaultwarden, they do appear in the web client. The behavior you’re describing hints that your passkeys are not being stored in bitwarden.
…and tbh, the UX sucks pretty bad: I was trying to store a passkey in bitwarden, but it was failing (unrelated networking error). I had two options: add it to bitwarden (which failed) or cancel. I hit cancel and was prompted for my fingerprint, which I provided – this ended up storing it on my device… no input, no description of what it was doing. The website came back with “passkey now enabled” :facepalm:
When you go to log in with a site that uses passkeys, bitwarden pops up with a list of passkeys for that site, the same way autofill shows your logins for that site.
Haven’t had that issue using Vaultwarden backend and bitwarden android, Firefox and Chrome extensions.
Yep, using the exact same and still have the problem.
Try protonpass. I switched from bitwarden to it. It’s not perfect but it’s much nicer
I have been doing the same thing. If the passkey tries to lock itself to a particular device, I’m not using it. I don’t feel like having Google, Microsoft or any other software company control my logins. If it can be stored in my KeepassXC vault, I will use it.
This is some weird doom and gloom take on a real improvement in public security that we don’t see very often. Of course there are a lot of stake holders. Of course every protocol is complicated. I run security for a company, and my auth systems mandate attested (i.e., company-provided) hardware keys. You’re not using a passkey on my systems that I’m not providing you. Pretty simple concept, yes?
Do you have any examples of any public service requiring attested keys? No, because it really doesn’t make sense. But because the protocol supports it, people shouldnt use passkeys? Shitty hot take.
I agree it would be helpful to make the feature set clearer to the end user, but the UX are still a mess across OS and websites. IMO that’s not a reason to not use them.
Passkeys are much more phishing resistant. They apply unqiue-credential best practices. I’ve been managing unique passwords for decades, and passkeys are a great improvement. Very few companies are going to completely remove other forms of auth, and so suggesting passkeys are ruining people’s ability to share passwords is really premature. And even so, companies have been pursuing other strategies for identifying shared accounts much more effectively than shared credentials. Thinking that’s a reason to not use passkeys just tells me you aren’t valuing how passkeys elevate public opsec.
Passkeys are projected to overcome TOTP market share next year. That is honestly amazing. I like the writeup on the features, but this nefarious, conspiratorial narrative doesn’t fit what’s actually happening.
Thanks.
My issue with passkeys is the fallback. For instance, when the biometric fails, you can use a fallback login. That’s fine (and good that it exists). But the fallback for me is a pin number. That pin is far less secure than my password or a randomized TOTP number.
How do you handle that for your setup?
Yeah good question, and more people should give consideration to account recovery. Are you referring to recovery PINs? There’s really a couple aspects to the design:
They are single use – this is really just to make sure users aren’t coming to rely on these PINs. It’s also a simple fact that passwords that are typed are more likely to be leaked than passwords that are never typed. Single-use do a great job taking advantage of that.
They lock after very few attempts and generally have more aggressive anti-hammering/brute force/backoff protection than password/TOTP attempts.
They help get new devices registered without already having a passkey.
Securing/backing them up has the same challenges as TOTP secrets management. Storing them in a password manager is what I generally do, but there are a few that warrant keeping offline completely and storing it in a fire-resistant/water-proof enclosure.
The other reliable recovery is just registering several passkeys and keeping one as the recovery credential. I always issue two hardware keys per employee, and we have a pretty lax policy if more are needed or replaced. We also don’t allow employees to recover their own accounts. If we’re at that situation, we need to know in order to help. And FWIW, I don’t use biometrics.
Maybe you’ll prefer more practical criticism then:
arstechnica.com/…/passkey-technology-is-elegant-b…
To put it simply, every passkey is locked into a large combination of factors: device + platform (OS) + app + the service being used. It is not trivial and often downright impossible to change any of these factors or to render them agnostic. This makes it complicated or impossible to backup passkeys or make them portable.
It’s fine for them to not be portable when they’re used on a work phone, running the company mandated OS, authentication app and passkey store, to login into a suite of apps that are also company-approved.
I do need portability and backup as an individual who wants to be able to login into multiple services across multiple apps running on multiple OS on multiple devices. But I can’t, because the big tech players (Microsoft/Google/Apple etc.) are actively trying to capture passkeys into their platforms and make it hard to get out in any practical way.
With passwords and TOTP I can run something that will sync them across devices and fill them in into any app in a unified manner (or use copy & paste if all else fails). With passkeys I can’t.
I haven’t found this to be the case in practice (IE passkeys are plenty portable). I’ve successfully used passkeys on multiple browsers, OS’s, and apps, all stored using a FOSS password manager (keepass). Any FOSS password manager that is either self-hosted, or syncs, should work just as well with passkeys as it does for regular passwords or TOTP.
I think there’s somewhat of a conflation of concerns. It sounds like your concern is, I have a credential manager and want to migrate to a new credential manager. I just want it to be simple to migrate my massive number of passwords, right? I need to bulk export + bulk import. EASY. But… what if your first password manager has a bug in the seed generator? Oops, you have to rotate 500 passwords now… there is no easy, off the shelf solution for that. It’s basically the same for hardware-bound passkeys. If you generate hardware-bound passkeys, you’re not going to simply replicate them to another hardware-bound passkey. The whole purpose of that type of credential, is to make it hardware-bound. There are a lot of meaningful reasons to do that from a security POV.
Now, I think what probably needs to be made clearer, is that if you do want that kind of credential, you shouldn’t be using TPM-backed passkeys. You should be purchasing independent hardware (FIDO2 hardware keys) or only make software+transferable passkeys. Personally, I have several hardware keys and I register them with one being a backup. If the vendor posts a vulnerability notice that there’s some big gap in their hardware, I will have to go and rotate every passkey. I know that is what I am signing up for, but maybe not a lot of people do.
No. My concern is that I want to choose my own credential manager, and I want it to work with any passkey usage out there. And that’s impossible.
Which credential manager, and which service is not working with it? Just looking for an example to understand what you’re struggling with. I feel like I don’t have these problems heh.
What do you mean, which. All of them have this problem. You can’t force any platform owner to use your favorite credential storage when they decide they don’t want to. All of them will tell you “for my services you use my storage, period”.
Literally just name a service that forces this. If it’s all of them, it should be pretty easy.
OK, Apple. How do I use passkeys created on iOS for accessing Apple services, on a Linux laptop?
I’ve personally refused to use Apple for decades because of their walled-garden, and it sounds like I’ll continue to follow that principle, heh. But that also has nothing to do with Passkeys, and everything to do with whatever Apple is doing. So I guess, you got me there, Apple sucks.
I will say, I am able to deploy FIDO2 for SSO on Apple devices just fine with both Microsoft Intune and Jamf. But that’s not really Apple’s Passkey vault.
Cheers
FWIW, the article may be a bit outdated. I’m not a FIDO expert by any means, but there have been improvements in the spec to help define how to transfer passkeys (CXF and CXP). The situation should be better than 2024, but if you’re using TPM-locked passkeys, you’re just in that locked box already.
Passkeys can be transferrable and syncable ( see keepassx, bitwarden, and relatives). But ideally, eventually, you never sync them because every time you log into a service with a new device, that device gets its own passkey. No need to sync them and you can revoke a devices access if it is lost or stolen without effecting any other device. They are closer to client certs than passwords in that respect.
Ah there’s that phrase again, remote attestation. That has very quickly become my least favourite phrase, and I’ve yet to see an example of it that benefits the end user. I didn’t know passkeys supported it but I’ll be avoiding them even harder now that I know they do.
I’ve already been avoiding them because I don’t see how there’s any security advantage over TOTP unless the passkey is the only way to access the account (which would be awful for account recovery). And the concept of tying my login to a specific device is stupid. I also don’t appreciate how many websites keep trying to stealthily create passkeys automatically on login without explaining what they are or letting the user make an informed decision.
I’m not going to challenge your choice in using passkey or not. However, I do want to set the “technical record straight”: passkey is the successor to TOTP in every technical way*.
TOTP works by having a “shared secret” saved by both you and the place that your authenticating against. This shared secret is then mixed with current time to generate a rotating number that the client shares with the remote server. The remote server does the same calculation, if the rotating numbers match, the user is successfully authenticated.
With TOTP, this means that there are two attack vectors: your device and the remote server. If an attacker is successful in getting the “shared secret” from either, your TOTP is effectively broken.
Passkey works more like ssh-keys. The client generates a public and private keypair. The client only shares the public portion with the remote server and stores the private key locally (or in your password manager).
So the only attack vector (with passkey) is your device (this is often why it’s bundled with attestation). Also passkey is not dependant on both the client and server having their time kept in sync. With TOTP, if you have more than ~30 seconds drift between the client and server, they will be generating different rotating codes and never match (which is confusing when you need to explain this to your Grandma).
Recovery options are never going to go away. With TOTP, you often have one-time use backup codes. Email, SMS recovery etc.
Oh that’s good to know, I didn’t realise TOTP was vulnerable on the server side. I’m still going to steer clear of passkeys for now though.
Thank you so much for clearly and concisely explaining how TOTPs are kept in sync between server and user. I KNEW the answer couldn’t be “magic”.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers when the FIDO Alliance threatened to recommend the blocking of FOSS implemententions because they gave the users control. Control over backing up. Control over not using biometrics.
When something wants too much power, you must avoid.
FIDO 2 level 2 also requires the supply chain documented and a bunch of expensive certificates, which locks small vendors and open hardware implememtations out.
Despite the attention-grabbing headline, the only negative thing I can find in the article about passkeys are this section:
I don’t see why we should assume this hypothetical is going to happen. There is a lot of different software that supports passkeys (I use keepass for example), and going against the open standard and forcing all their users to use a specific software would basically make them unusable.
Overall every password / login style has its dangers and bad ways to use it, including passkeys. That doesn’t make them “traps”.
A lot of platforms will happily not allow people to login with a KeePass passkey. Just like some platforms already no longer let me login with a password and force me to login with a code they send me per email instead.
Which are those? I haven’t had one that rejected keepass so far.
Also, like, if it doesn’t allow me to set up a passkey because my manager or OS is not supported…I guess I’m not setting up a passkey then, which is OK by me, so there is no problem.
No problem until they make every other method more and more difficult. Which is already happening.
I only use passkeys when the alternative is an onerous song and dance.
SQRL, been around before passkeys, it’s portable, and it’s FOSS.
I wish SQRL was more commonly used.
So… Uh… What’s a passkey? The article is saying they’re pure evil. Everyone here is saying they’re good. Everyone knows what they are except for me.
What’s the difference between a passkey and a password?
www.yubico.com/resources/…/what-is-a-passkey/
Sounds like a turbo encabulator.
Also, that website is full of sand traps. Every time I accidentally mouse over something, a huge menu covers up the definition.
So in order to log into most websites, you need your username/email address and a password.
You can save your username/password in your web browser or in the cloud.
Sometimes people get lazy and reuse passwords, sometimes people forget their passwords.
Passkey is a replacement for usernames/passwords. It does require that the passkey is saved somewhere, often on your device (in the cloud is possible, but non-standard).
When you “create” a passkey, this passkey is used only at a single place. For example, you’d have a passkey for your bank, another one for your email, another one for Lemmy. You have no say in the matter, that’s just how it works.
When you log into a website that has passkey enabled, your passkey/password manager pops up, you click on the passkey and that’s it. There is no email address, there is no password, no MFA.
edit: oh, you also asked about the difference between passwords.
It’s all about improved security.
You go to certain websites, and they’ll only allow a-zA-Z0-9, others require a minimum length of 8 characters, needs 3 symbols (except ! for whatever reason ;)
Then you have no idea how the website is storing your password. Are they encrypting it? Did they do it correctly?
If you look at the number of “breached/leaked” passwords on the internet, it’s because it’s hard to securely store passwords.
Passkey solves all this. Websites are just given “a public key” and it can be “just stored”, no special treatment necessary.
This is still fuzzy. What would this look like in BASIC?
Imagine instead of inventing and storing passwords in your head and typing them in each device. With passkeys each device generates a real, cryptographically strong password for each site and stores it in a secured part of the device. Nothing to memorize.
Sites must now to let you have many passwords so you can have many devices without needing to sync between devices like a password manager might do.
No one can guess your password and it is never reused because they are machine generated. They are protected on device by the security of your device (typically behind a pin) so if you trust your OS, it is safe (which, in effect is the same as passwords you type).
Unfortunately, the experience still sucks and shitty companies might use them to further lock people in if they end up with all their passkeys on one iphone, for example.
Microsoft has been a major annoyance on me with passkeys. I don’t like not knowing for sure that I can get back into an account if any of my devices get fucked (authenticators are nice and I do have some things setup but always worry if my phone is broken or lost out of nowhere). They (Microsoft) have such a dark pattern way of pushing passkeys. When I have to help someone get into their MS account at work (normal consumer PC stuff not IT/corp stuff) which is already hard since the people I try to help already don’t tend to realize how important even simple things they don’t think about WILL fuck them later. Some examples are stereotypical “boomers” that default to adding their land-line when an account asks for a phone number, or that they were even making an account (another dark pattern from Windows 8 where sooooo many people created @outlook.com accounts without really paying attention).
Obviously I experience a higher than average amount of tech illiterate folks (that also seem to just not care like shit is still the Windows 7 and earlier times). But Microsoft pushes dialog prompts/boxes for physical security keys and passkeys in a way that at first seems like the person has one of those setup. In some cases trying to sign into an account without a passkey/security key it will do what I expect. Give an extra option to not keep using a password or password+text/email code, or setup passkeys to “not have to worry about remembering passwords”. Though I still think they don’t really clearly explain how crucially important it is to make sure the person’s information for the account is correct and making damn sure to know recovery options if anything happens.
But I started seeing just a box pop-up that looks like a system prompt that only gives two options. Enter your PIN/insert security key, or to use the authenticator app. No obvious option for picking that neither are setup. The only way for not using those is to click the X on the top-right of the prompt. In some cases I have seen people click on the options and it just acts like they are setup. Pick the authenticator option and it asks for the code on an app/device that doesn’t exist. In the cases that it does start the process of setting up passkeys, I still feel like they are trying to trick people into it rather than the users choosing to do it.
Again I deal with more than average “I’m not a ‘techy’!” kinds of people along with older folks. But it really does seem like any level of tech literacy keeps getting worse based on running into more and more people of all ages. Which is what freaks me out about how these things are suddenly seemingly pushed on folks at the worst moments. A lot of people first trying to setup their new device just want to get into it as fast as possible, and really don’t understand how they can just lose access to so many things they didn’t realize are now tied together. Let alone be aware that they should export those things to something that isn’t tied to the OS in the event they for some reason want to get something else (PC to Mac/Mac to PC/Android to iOS/iOS to Android/etc).
Oops, I lost my device or bricked it, now what? Login with passsword? Password reset?
Password reset, and your mail account used for that is secured by a passkey 😬
Please send a blood sample to Google Gemini to confirm your identity.
As the article states, they’re an extremely malicious solution to a problem that has better, simpler, and easier to understand solutions.
It’s also a very good solution to the “problem” of users being able to do things our corporate overlords don’t want us to do.
In short, they’re even worse malware than the ones they’re sold as protecting us from.
Enshittification manifest.
Can you give an example?
Password is a shared secret: When you want me to prove myself, i repeat the password we both know. Both of us could loose that password and it happens every day. Can’t go a day without a major data breach news.
passkeys use public-private keys. Anyone can posses the public key, so that is ok to leak. The private key you keep to yourself. When you ask me to prove myself, you hand me a challange which i manipulate with my private key and hand back to you. You check it with the public key and conclude that i am indeed the one that posseses the private key. Mathematical magic! The private key was never shared.
For the user, the password is replaced with a file stored somewhere. Either in your usb security key or in your password manager of choice. Stored in a security key (aka authenticator), the private key never leaves the authenticator and all cryptographic operations are done inside it. The private key can’t leak. Amazing! Passkes in a security key are called hardware bound, very secure and nice. The security key, you can plug out and take with you. There are built in hardware like this in phones and computers. But you can’t take that with you. That sucks. They only authenticate that device. But you can make any number of passkes for all your devices.
The bad part is that some big corporatins would like to control where and how you can store the passkeys and preferably make it harder for you to escape them. The solution is to not use the services of these malicious corpos.
Imagine if a romantic partner said “I will send you a unique string, probably exactly 8 characters” to verify that I am your partner. You would laugh and remind them it takes less than a second to generate every 8 character combination possible.
Instead, your SO makes a key and keeps it with them at all times, and you promise to talk to them using a machine that makes secret messages only their key can decipher. For fun, they give you a key and make a machine too… Explaining this shit is complicated I’m sorry for what you’re about to read.
They send “heyy”, You send “whatup”, They send “send pics”, You take one, encrypt and send the pic, They say “huh? Wtf?”, You remind them about the secret key, They have no idea what you’re talking about -fail OR they send something in return back (which you decrypt) -success
That’s basically the same thing as authentication with a passkey oversimplified and only slightly wrong but good enough. There’s shitloads of devices that do it, yubikeys, authenticator apps, but they’re all doing that.
It’s something you pass around–like a word, but a key instead. If you’re familiar with passwords–instead of a word–imagine a key: a passkey. That’s what passkeys are. The issue with passkeys is–as you pass them around they begin to open more and more stuff; everyone is opening stuff with your key as it’s passed. So they need to be sanitized every now and then. Deposit them into a furnace and buy a new passkey. Every two to three days. If you have more questions please feel free to ask!
Okay. I think I’m understanding. A passkey is a virtual key? That we have to buy? And some company makes these virtual keys? And there’s a virtual locksmith who makes virtual locks? And you have to hire them to install them on your computer? Is this what’s going on?
I apologize. The reply you responded to was entirely satirical. It was written in frustration. From my point of view passkeys are the way to do authentication. More specifically public-key cryptography. It has a lot of desirable qualities. Governments and ‘tech platforms’ should have been using it from the start–we’ve had the software to do this since the 1980s and it was libre-software by the 1990s.
Any criticism of passkeys (as brought up in this thread) are more so applicable to the private-dictatorships that are Microsoft, Apple and Google. The contrary behavior of continuing to use these private-dictatorships whilst decrying passkeys is tantamount to hypocrisy? stupidity? To give a tiny bit of context: the quality of attestation in passkeys are also applicable to SSL-certificates, yet no one is decrying SSL-certificates. It’s also applicable to every GNU/Linux distribution and libre-software at large.
That’s to say the criticism is written from a place of ignorance. “Privacy” forums on the internet are not interested in reality. Their users are full of users with static behaviors. More often than not any questions asked in these places amount to “how can I continue doing what I was doing before? Big-corp has introduced a change I don’t like. I want to do the exact same thing on big-corp that was previously permissible.” When the factual observation is stated: “big-corp is a corporation designed for surveillance-capitalism therefore if you desire liberty and privacy whilst computing you cannot use such a corporation in any manner” it’s met with unfounded hostility, hypocrisy and lies. Any use of such software is contrary to your stated desire: digital-privacy. Even when responses illustrate how you could achieve what the OP wanted, but with libre-software and privacy-preserving-software you’re often met with: “no. I want to use Google/Microsoft/et al.” Users are lazy idiots.
Technical and correct responses are ignored whilst a flood of ignorant, emotional or status-quo enforcing responses are brought to magnified attention. I’ve abandoned restraint and started to shitpost as every one else appears to be doing.
I suppose this is all a criticism of ‘social-media’ and how it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
The praise is also written from a place of ignorance too. People love it and they don’t know what it is. If you can’t explain it to a five year old, then you don’t understand it. And if we don’t understand, it’s a horrible idea to fork over our security to it. We don’t want to rely on a box full of ADE 651 bomb detectors.
You’re an idiot.
Are you serious?
No. Sorry.
The article warns that passkeys could be used, assuming they become the only form of logging into platforms, to prevent someone using the wrong operating system to log into those platforms.
Being prevented from using certain applications because you use the wrong OS is nothing new, but there is, from everything i have seen, always a reason to block it, they dont do it for someone elses benefit. A lot of banking apps cannot be used on many android roms; without microg or gapps many android apps wont work (some wont work even with microg); games sometimes use kernel-level anticheat that forces players to use windows; people solved this issue by just not using those apps
Why would a significant portion of used websites/applications that require accounts stop allowing passwords or authenticator apps, relying on this open standard, force certain options to be used for the standard and ensure that the user isnt on an operating system they have no reason to care about. There are already methods to prevent people from using a certain OS, they could just not rely on an open standard
Website supports passkeys. Browser supports passkeys. Extension supports passkeys.
Then why does it keep asking me to “insert my security key”? Why doesn’t it work?
Passkeys are bullshit.
I had to work with keepass and the Firefox fork I’m using to have them speak together correctly. From memory it had to do with an incorrect directory / socket being used.
Zero trust is the end station, if you allow organizations to treat your personal devices as being theirs. Organizations that could actually benefit from the increased security (which isn’t Twitter, except for some high-profile individuals, maybe), should provide the user with resources to do so, at their expense (issuing a dedicated TOTP device for example).
But what tends to happen instead, is enshittification of service, while offloading it onto the client. A similar trend can be observed with car parking: where operators remove parking meters, and require the customer to use their device and data plan, to make a payment to the operator…
We’ve been on this trajectory for quite a while now: from Outlook enforcing IT-policies of email administrators (dictating screen locking requirements as device administration app), to SMS-based 2FA requiring one to have a mobile phone number and tying all to this tamper-resistant identifier. So why not a black box snitch, paid for by the client, further restrict their freedom for “security”?
It seems perfectly in line, and I think this article draws all the right parallels.
finally people are waking up to this garbage.
I didn’t even know what they were until now. And still don’t. Every explanation sounds like a long convoluted MLM pitch. They smell fishy as hell. They may need more grameters to prevent side fumbling.
The convenience of using passkeys is a double-edged sword.
This is also one of the ways Playstation stops you from installing Linux and other unauthorised software on the PS5.
It’s wild seeing people spaz out over passkeys, clearly venting at something that isn’t passkeys.
I suspected as much, being shoved on us like AI.
dude speaks about not being able to write down his passkey, then he acts like it can only be saved in bigtech clouds, then some random ai rumbling starts about ads being show to us? can you guys stop posting these god damn fearmongering password articles written by ai?
That seems to miss the main point of the article, which is that Passkey standard has attestation procedure built in. A site that uses Passkey can verify the flags you set and deny your access if you use unapproved device, operating system, old kind of secure chip or, say, allow your passkey to be shared between devices.
As far as I know using a password manager such as KeePassXC or Bitwarden solves all of these problems?
Make that question mark a period, good sir/ma’am!
and your redundant 3-2-1 backup system of that. Everyone knows that! Surely no one has no backups. Oh well, can’t design around that unpredictable problem that no one could guess. Everyone has backups!
I mean I would hope so, but even if not losing a password manager database sucks regardless if you used passkeys or not.
An attempt to make an image describing where passkeys live: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/0a90c8ea-9de4-4195-84f4-2164847a2b5f.avif">
Passkeys give me anxiety because it’s like “Hope you can go the rest of your life without a phone or USB drive getting lost or stolen LMAO”
Use a password manager like bitwarden et al.
Too bad. Passkeys are a pretty good thing and are an enhancement over passwords… but big tech is doing their thing again.
Passkeys are intentionally badly designed but as long as you use them with an open source password manager they can be an immense security improvement. Alternatively if you’re using a cryptographic USB token register a second passkey in your password manager.
Healthequity tried forcing this passkey garbage on me, and they wouldn’t allow me to manage investments over the phone, so I ended up transferring everything to a different HSA provider. Not giving in. I love TOTP though.
Basically the problem is that Passkeys are designed to allow a particularly bad enshittification once everyone uses them. So it’s not about downsides of using them now, but about them being used in general and then abused.
I like the article and agree with the problem, but I’m skeptical that this works as a strategy to fix the problem. First off, individual responsibility or boycott doesn’t really work. Most people will just use what their phone gives. Second if the corporations do want to do this, they could implement it separately in their apps, like twitter or google chrome requiring quasi-attested “homebrew” passkeys stored in cryptoprocessors. Ultimately I do not think we have any power to prevent them from doing that.
The time of democracy and pluralism is over. We’re already seeing the author of the article being maligned and personally attacked for talking about AI - how dares he? On all fronts we have lost the culture war and lost power, economic power, information power like access to truth.
Yeah, but if the big company wants to embed weird shit in their client software… A frontier model can reverse engineer the client, determine what satisfied the authentication request, and replicate the implementation elsewhere on our own terms. Can do this with less than $100 worth of compute. I know because I’m already compiling/sideloading iOS apps with Xcode on my Gentoo desktop — Apple can eat shit.
Then this turns into yet another arms race.
Hiding stuff in client side software never stopped being an arms race between the producer and consumer. LG TVs are a great example.
Looks like it boils down to that? Because I just started using a few and they’re on my self hosted vaultwarden so…
This is another way they’ll lock out Linux as an OS. It won’t pass passkey attestation or age check attestation so it just won’t be allowed to access the web because clearly you’re a bot or some other bad actor for failing those.
That or they’ll create a special government backdoored and approved Linux that has attestation in among a bunch of other blackbox modules that you have to trust aren’t an NSAKEY right into your system.
The future looks so bleak with all this online, Flock, Axon, etc cameras IRL controlling all movement and all fed into Palantir for one online and offline profile of you for the police state.
There is a subtlety here that I feel like is being missed. Yes, via remote attestation, websites can require only passkeys from Google and Apple are usable. But you can still use those passkeys with Linux. It is a restriction on how you can authenticate and I can understand concerns over the lack of freedom in this area, but it is pretty far from a threat that would prevent the use of Linux.