Advocating for privacy and at the same time speaking about "corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon" is a contradiction for me.
Have all your mails at Google, ship stuff home with Amazon, but your authentication mechanism is a trap and anti-privacy?
My company's product uses passkeys-only and it works great. We don't need to store user's email addresses if they don't want to. Because we don't need a password-reset flow. Because passkeys usually sync and backup. And if you really want, you can have multiple passkeys for your account (or multiple accounts).
I don't see how we could use passkeys as a trap.
Our users find it convenient and the security properties speak for themselves.
One of the biggest issues with the implementation of passkeys that I've encountered is that I'm not offered the choice of where a passkey will be stored. It's just a fight between my password manager, my browser and my OS which all try to be "first" to intercept the passkey request, and if the "wrong one" gets it there's no way to say "actually no, I didn't want you to handle this passkey request".
The author is clearly saying that the attestation feature is a trap. Typical consumer-oriented websites don’t use this feature. Therefore it is not a trap for your users. However there is no way for users to know and understand that.
Note that attestation can only be required during credential registration; at login time it's not possible to retroactively require attestation if it wasn't obtained during registration. And browsers will throw up a permission prompt if a website requests attestation. Are Netflix and Twitter currently requesting attestation when people register passkeys, and rejecting the registration if the user declines the permission prompt? I very much doubt it, since Apple's passkey implementation doesn't support attestation.
Therefore, the author's scenario that sites will wait until most of their users are using attested passkeys and then "flip the switch and start rejecting non-attested passkeys" isn't very plausible.
Attestation is certainly a stain on the WebAuthn spec, and it would have been better if Chrome and Firefox didn't support attestation (unless perhaps the browser is enrolled in enterprise management), but this blog post is presenting a hypothetical and unlikely scenario. That's not a good enough reason to recommend TOTP instead, given that TOTP is vulnerable to phishing and passkeys aren't.
If consumer-facing sites start requesting attestation when registering passkeys, they deserve to be vigorously called out, and maybe then the recommendation to use passkeys should be revisited. But until that happens, don't tell people not to use passkeys.
> at login time it's not possible to retroactively require attestation if it wasn't obtained during registration.
Of course it is, the site will reject the passkey and require you to create one that is attested.
> Are Netflix and Twitter currently requesting attestation when people register passkeys, and rejecting the registration if the user declines the permission prompt?
They could start tomorrow.
> a hypothetical and unlikely scenario.
You have not been paying attention, that scenario is where this whole thing is building towards.
> If consumer-facing sites start requesting attestation when registering passkeys, they deserve to be vigorously called out
It's going to be the banks first.
Why called out, it's all for your safety, to make sure you are not using an insecure client that might leak your data.
In Japan, this is already the reality. The FSA required brokerages to implement passkey authentication, and the effect is that it's no longer possible to have a brokerage account without a passkey. (Some brokerages, like Nomura Securities, will offer two separate client portals. The portal with money and trading-related functionality requires a passkey).
The thing that sucks a lot is that brokerages seem to also restrict the allowed software/hardware. Don't know the details, but none of my FIDO2 hardware keys were able to be used. I consistently use these hardware keys through WebAuthn, so I was surprised when my brokerage explicitly told me my hardware key is unsupported and I must use either Windows Hello or the iOS Passwords app.
The FSA's official explanation for mandating passkey implementation is that people kept falling for phishing attacks, and the attacks were getting too sophisticated thanks to "AI" or something.
> The FSA's official explanation for mandating passkey implementation is that people kept falling for phishing attacks, and the attacks were getting too sophisticated thanks to "AI" or something.
Ah, yet another case of people being forced to use technology instead of being left alone doing things the old way where they understood all the risks.
> The thing that sucks a lot is that brokerages seem to also restrict the allowed software/hardware. Don't know the details, but none of my FIDO2 hardware keys were able to be used. I consistently use these hardware keys through WebAuthn, so I was surprised when my brokerage explicitly told me my hardware key is unsupported and I must use either Windows Hello or the iOS Passwords app.
Of course not, you still have some control over those FIDO2 hardware keys and they don't lock you to a limited set of devices. That's what the attestation is for, to allow banning the use of sign-in with anything but a couple megacorp providers. The few small time hangers on will be expelled in time. They're useful idiots for the adoption phase.
Notice that after lots of complaining about there being no way to transfer keys in the spec they developed some planned working group that will in the end only allow transferring from Google/Microsoft/Apple and maybe a few other dumpster companies. They aren't going to give that control up.
They could also start requiring you to mail a DNA sample to create an account tomorrow.
> It's going to be the banks first.
The same banks that (in the US) largely don’t even systematically use 2FA for online banking logins and completely ignore 3DS for card payments? Attestation usually requires customers to buy and carry extra hardware, so I highly doubt it.
The only place I’ve seen mandatory attestation is in enterprise IT, where admins can supply and enforce usage of e.g. Yubikeys.
Yes, the same banks that simultaneously don't support 2FA, or only support it via SMS, while insisting that mobile devices pass attestation. Also the same banks that still accept swiped credit card transactions but god forbid you want to register a custom non-attested device for wireless payment transactions. Those banks. Lets not pretend that the policies of US banks are by and large either internally consistent or in the customer's best interests.
Just go into r/Magisk, about 9 of 10 posts is a user whose banking app fails attestation.
Fuck banks with a cactus for forcing us to relinquish our freedoms as a precondition of interacting with them, which is a precondition to exist in most societies.
On my GrapheneOS phone, the only things that I came across that require (and thus fail) maximum level attestation are Google Pay and the app for McDonald's for some reason.
Sure, mobile device app attestation is a big problem for openness, but it has nothing to do with passkeys, where attestation is effectively dead for non-enterprise uses.
Arguably, even passkeys with attestation would be a step forward compared to that, as banks could require an external authenticator tap on a rooted device, or signature of some sandboxed secure element that runs independently from the application OS.
> Sure, mobile device app attestation is a big problem for openness, but it has nothing to do with passkeys, where attestation is effectively dead for non-enterprise uses.
It’s dead so far. Again, X.com could ask you to re-enroll your passkey next time you sign in, but this time requiring attestation. It’ll be phrased like “we’re upgrading your account security, please click ‘Accept’ to proceed”.
> banks could require [...a] signature of some sandboxed secure element that runs independently from the application OS
Every iPhone, every supported macOS device, all Windows machines capable of running Windows 11 and all mainstream Android devices capable of running Netflix have a Secure Enclave of some sort capable of doing remote attestation, and for virtually all of them, Secure Boot providing the foundation for it is enabled and enforced.
It just took a decade worth of waiting after the first failed attempt by MS to push TPM support.
The only device categories where Secure Boot and Remote Attestation are either disabled, unsupported or not usable for the purpose of trusted attestation are many Linux systems and Android devices not sanctioned by Google.
No, Apple used to support passkey attestation on iOS, but has since removed that feature. The same is true for macOS. Android still supports it, but not for synchronized passkeys as far as I know.
Not sure how DRM factors in here; it's a completely different problem space. Or is your stance something like "anything even theoretically capable of performing trusted computing is evil"?
Okay, so it’s possible, but Google is not doing it correctly yet, so they won’t be doing it ever despite the fact they have all the incentives to do so?
Google still supports it, but only for some configurations (non-copyable, non-transferable). My point is, they could implement it for other variants as well.
> How? Almost none of their users own an authenticator capable of attestation (i.e., a Yubikey or similar).
I haven’t checked, but I suppose both Google and Apple have passkeys implementations capable of attestation? (If not, it should be fairly easy to add, and considering Google has been pushing for various “integrity” bullshit, this would be a no-brainer for them.)
> They can't, because open/neutral access secure elements do not exist yet, and nobody really wants to carry an external one.
Presumably, banks trust Google, so if Android doesn’t erase attestation information from the HSM when unlocking the bootloader, they could use this process to verify that the key they’ve generated is stored there, regardless of whatever other software the user is running. (If Android does erase attestation info then eh, it’s just as bad as relying on Play Integrity APIs.)
Apple used to support attestation but removed it. That alone makes it non-viable for sites to enforce attestation.
> I’m not 100% sure if this would work: [...]
I believe it might, but like you I'm not sure if they really don't measure some secure boot properties into that keystore these days.
It's also usually implemented in TEEs and attested by the device manufacturer, which means there's a high chance of getting either insecure implementations in the mix or ending up with a heterogeneous mess of supported and non-supported manufacturers varying from bank to bank.
FIDO at least has their manufacturer directory; not sure if Google has something similar for Android (and if it does, whether non Google certified Android OEMs may apply).
Okay, I’ve thought about it a bit, and I’d be okay with attestation in WebAuthn if it required that the keys are transferable between providers, and that if you require attestation you don’t require any specific provider. I.e. ban vendor lock-in: if I have a key, I should be able to use it, and move my passkey to another one if I need to.
> Apple used to support attestation but removed it. That alone makes it non-viable for sites to enforce attestation.
Again, for now. Apple might have less incentives to bring it back than Google, sure, but their products are not really known for being open platforms either.
So I set up my own self hosted provider, and transfer the keys to it, and ... how is this any different from not being attested? The entire point of attestation is to whitelist providers so a requirement for universal transfer would seem to defeat the purpose.
I appreciate an enterprise wanting attestation for certain things, but I don't think consumer oriented protocols should support it. I also think it would make more sense for protocols to support some sort of arbitrarily extensible co-signing scheme instead of device attestation. So corporate keeps a registry of secure elements they own and which users are associated with each one. So there's no way for a vendor to lock authentication (or whatever else) to a specific OEM but corporate IT (or an end user or etc) would still be capable of binding credentials to some subset of physical devices.
...get it certified, then transfer the keys to it. Or more likely you get an HSM and use its certification.
> I don't think consumer oriented protocols should support it.
Ideally yeah, that’s my point of view as well. In the corporate land however...
> binding credentials to some subset of physical devices
I don’t think that’s the goal. My guess is, they want to be able to transfer some passkeys but not allow any copies, and this only works if one device trusts another. It could work still with your scheme (store a private key on each device; when transferring a secret, make one device encrypt it to the other and immediately destroy its own copy, and make IT department sign any transfer requests so they can check whether they own both devices).
> if you require attestation you don’t require any specific provider. I.e. ban vendor lock-in: if I have a key, I should be able to use it, and move my passkey to another one if I need to.
Unfortunately this is fundamentally at odds attestation: If you trust anybody capable of providing a syntactically valid signature, it's not attestation anymore.
You can try and set up a neutral clearinghouse vetting attestation providers, but that itself will probably become a centralizing force itself, requiring expensive audits etc. – think web PKI certificate authorities, but even more complex (as you need keys in shipped end user devices, not just somebody's data center HSMs).
I think shunning attestation is largely the right move, with a very short list of exceptions (high trust e-signatures, high value bank transactions but not daily payment confirmation etc.)
> You can try and set up a neutral clearinghouse vetting attestation providers, but that itself will probably become a centralizing force itself, requiring expensive audits etc.
It is a problem, but isn’t FIDO acting as this body already wrt attestation in WebAuthn? I’m only building on top of this existing process.
Regardless, a sibling commenter has a good idea of how to sidestep this in corporate environment, and I think it should work for most of actually useful purposes.
> I think shunning attestation is largely the right move
I’m glad we’re on the same page :-) But as long as we have attestation for passkeys, I think we should at least make it as hard as humanly possible to (ab)use it as a general device attestation scheme.
Fuck Play Integrity, which is what Google implements, with these drawbacks very much intentionally in place, and 'recommended' banks implement for security. Fuck Google for doing everything they can to make custom roms fail these API's ever more.
There is an alternative* of which I haven't heard in a while.
You've read all the laws? Regardless, there is likely a legal framework preventing competition and requiring the banks to standardise and coordinate. Otherwise people would go start their own bank that didn't require remote attestation; because the best way to pick up customers is to be flexible about letting them access their own money. In a free market there is a lot of pressure on financial service companies to butter their customers up (at least until the customer owes them cash).
If you're dealing with a legal oligopoly then it is expected that the quality won't be so great.
Any site/service could easily implement their own proprietary solution to force compliance around usage of said service. Whether they can abuse Passkeys or not is irrelevant. If the service does something inappropriate, you can stop using it and, if necessary, build a competing service that is not abusive.
To suggest that people should stop using Passkeys over this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All of these features of Passkeys are appropriate in a given context. The only concern is where a service that might not need/justify "high security" Passkeys starts demanding them anyway, and no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case.
> To suggest that people should stop using Passkeys over this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Nah, it's fair to regard anything that supports remote attestation as toxic and aggressively thrust it into the biohazard waste incinerator. Any whiff of remote attestation, even being adjacent to it, and an angry mob should appear to burn your entire castle to the ground. Deters companies from wanting to be associated with it.
Also impedes the motte and bailey where they claim you can opt out of it until it's entrenched enough that you can't.
> no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case.
Until something with a monopoly or both halves of a duopoly or a strong network effect starts demanding it.
>> no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case
What remotely attested passkeys will really start being adopted for -- blocking consumer AI agent use.
Think about how many billable products are essentially convenience automation on top of a user's existing access in a platform?
What if consumers start using AI agents to interact with platforms in ways that skip those billing toll gates (because their agents are remixing actions / data on the user side)?
Both the intended (I'm skipping a premium charge) and unintended (I used a hacked agent and/or my agent went awry) are going to become major issues for companies in the next 5 years.
And the question will be asked "Can't we just ban user AI from using our app?"
Attested passkeys are going to be an awfully tempting option to reach for as an answer. Especially for banks. (Fuck banks' technology stacks)
What baby? Oh boy, a new authentication method just as secure as my unique per-site random password that I keep in my password manager already anyway, except I also completely lose access to it if I ever get locked out of my Google devices. The future is truly revolutionary.
Passkeys are stored in your password manager, too. You'll only lose access to your passkeys if Google is your password manager and you get locked out of your Google account. So, if you don't trust Google, use another password manager. (May I recommend Bitwarden?)
The advantage of passkeys is that no one can trick you into giving your passkeys to the wrong person. Every time this comes up, people say "I don't need that! I've got a password manager. I'm too smart to get tricked." But they are wrong.
The concern is that the site you're logging into can tell the difference between a passkey created by Google on a (recent, non-rooted, locked bootloader) Android device using its cryptoprocessor, and a passkey created by Bitwarden which you can sync/backup as you like. And Google, Apple & Microsoft are well positioned to encourage people towards the former over the latter.
The possibility that sites will require attested keys does seem pretty remote at the moment, but if passkeys take off and >95% of people use keys tied to their phone, I could totally see sites starting to prevent you using a key from Bitwarden. I don't think there's a conspiracy trying to achieve this, but the incentives of security & lock-in could push us there.
Exactly. We saw this with banking apps forcing use to use insecure but attested devices for their insurances. Fool me once... no thank you to passkeys for now.
I believe passkeys can be made phishing resistant, as they can be cryptographically bound to a given application, and the application has to attest itself to your system too.
You won't be able to use your google account passkey to log into the perfect clone of "gmail.com" where the 'a' is actually a greek or cyrillic letter or something, and neither will your ageing parents. You could still paste your password into the fake site from your password manager, or the spyware on your computer could still sniff it from your clipboard.
But users can and do override this decision. "Huh, why isn't 1Password autofilling my password on bank0f4merica.com? Let me quickly select 'autofill and remember'..."
I'm somewhat desensitized to this myself for non-bank use cases. It's unfortunately necessary with corporate merges and rebrands. After all, how is my password manager supposed to know that it's safe to fill my hulu.com password on disneyplus.com? The same applies to mobile apps providing some-outsourcing-vendor.com instead of my-actual-service-provider.com etc.
Being able to enter my Hulu password on disneyplus.com is a feature, being able to enter my Bank of America password on bank0famerica.com is a bug. The problem is that the same behavior causes both.
...until you login to, say, your Microsoft account on one of like 27 domains that use the same SSO and your autofill doesn't trigger so you just grumble to yourself "man I hate the modern web" and manually copy/paste it in.
Hopefully after thoroughly checking the URL but you only have two minutes before the Uber gets here and just need to get this one last thing done ASAP...
> If the service does something inappropriate, you can stop using it and, if necessary, build a competing service that is not abusive.
Like how everyone stopped using Google/Gmail, Facebook/Instagram and Windows/Office365 and flocked to alternatives?
Let's flip your suggestion. What if someone says if you need "high security" build a competing service that enforces it, no one is forcing you to use a "low security" service ?
The people don't care enough to bother, and that's fine - it's not your (or my) place to force other people to do anything.
My point was not about getting critical mass, it's that the service can already do anything they like to lock people into whatever they want and gatekeep their service. They can do it with Passkeys, or they can do it with a proprietary alternative and if they're big enough, they'll get away with it. Neither of us can sway them at all - I wasn't saying they should do this, only that they can.
Blaming Passkeys is aiming at the wrong target. Passkeys rightly offer features that have valid use-cases, even the attestation in the right context. Can they be abused? Probably, but so can just about anything. Passkeys do, on the other hand, offer some real tangible benefits that other mainstream solutions do not.
> Can they be abused? Probably, but so can just about anything. Passkeys do, on the other hand, offer some real tangible benefits that other mainstream solutions do not.
Let the usecases that need passkeys use it.
Why can't there be a parallel standard with similar features that doesn't have the parts that can potentially be abused. If the difference between abuse and non-abuse is a vague promise and the good graces of corporate structures, it is better to err on the side of caution and demand solutions that make it impossible.
> The people don't care enough to bother, and that's fine - it's not your (or my) place to force other people to do anything.
Yeah it wasn't your place or anyone else's. How can you or I force anyone. Not sure why that even came up.
Debate is how we evolve new and alternate solutions. Handwaving by saying not your place or mine is not how we affect change if needed.
Any government can spy on a few people, and we're generally fine with that. But when they build a robust network of surveillance devices but pinky promise that they're only being used to spy on those same few people, we bring out the electric saws. It's a very similar situation with normalizing passkeys.
The concern you're raising here is that the government might secretly force big companies like Facebook or Google to require attested passkeys that restrict usage to only approved first-party keystores right?
Passkeys exist now and there's no taking them back. However, even if they did not, the government might well just develop its own authentication system and require that it be used under policies that require age verification for social media, for example. Hell, they might end up doing that anyway, and that would be no different. If the government wants to force tracking/verification on certain websites, it won't simply be something they walk away from if Passkeys don't exist. You can only fight this with your vote and by not using those services once they implement such controls.
> Passkeys exist now and there's no taking them back.
I mean, we can take them back. Everybody refuse to use them and cause as much trouble as possible for anyone who tries to make you. Use TOTP or similar instead.
> If the government wants to force tracking/verification on certain websites, it won't simply be something they walk away from if Passkeys don't exist.
The way you fight things like this is by making it so the current technology is incapable of doing it and then if they try to legislate it, you have more time to roll back the policy before the technology to support it can be developed and imposed on everyone.
Implementing support for the dystopian technology before the law even requires it is the opposite of that.
I kind of agree, the problem is not individual sites consuming passkeys.
The main problem in my mind is on the side of the vendors, attestation, secure hardware, etc is all an excuse to lock you in to their device/ecosystem.
Banks want attested terminals and for the customer to pay for them. An even better deal for the bank than ATMs, kind of like of how cable TV boxes enforce DRM on the customer and are paid for by the customer.
I've been menionting this a lot and it feels like no one is listening. These 3rd and 2nd party actors are expecting for you to pay for equipment for them. It's insane.
More context: I've been saying this a lot about this in the scan and go at sams club and how there are fanatics that act like it's a good thing and to be the only way to pay.
You'll pay for their security measures either way. Does it really matter that much if you see the line item charge or if it's baked into your interest rate spread?
Just gotta hope that based on how economic theory is supposed to work, if doing these things result in saving costs during procurement of specialized equipment, the savings are passed on to the consumer… hopefully…
Apple used to support attestation, but has removed it from recent iOS versions.
I really wish WebAuthN critics could finally update on this point. There is so much else to complain about, but nobody will listen to somebody regurgitating points stale by several years.
> Apple used to support attestation, but has removed it from recent iOS versions [therefore, Passkey attestation isn't going to happen].
From [0] (via [1]), we have the following statement from an unnamed Apple Systems Engineer:
Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.
Attestation was designed to attest to a specific device, exclusively at the point of creation, with a specific set of security properties. It doesn't make sense for synced credentials for a number of reasons, including syncing to devices with different security properties, changes in security properties that happen after key creation, security properties of the sync fabric, sharing the passkey, or exporting to other passkey providers. We're working hard with W3C and FIDO to solve these problems.
Sounds to me like Apple is working hard to enable attestation. It also sounds like attestation _might_ also require sharply restricting -if not preventing- freedom to sync the attested credential.
For a lot of people Apple is the ecosystem they access everything through, including payment processing. That cuts both ways, but Apple has shown a clear preference for protecting user privacy when they could have chosen to do otherwise, presumably because it makes them more money in the long run.
Why would that suddenly change in Netflix or some other company's favor at Apple's direct expense?
It's not in Apples expense, it's actually in it's benefit, your keys would be in their system, and impossible for anyone (including you) to get them out of it.
So you are now locked in to the apple ecosystem forever. You now need Apple to watch Netflix from your Samsung TV.
Apple has very good support for Passkey storage in third party password managers/wallets. They don't seem to want Passkeys to be a lock in. They've also made it clear that they see attestation as a consumer privacy violation and won't support it.
I see your angle, but would take their comments more at face value: their concern is really sync, anything privacy probably being the nice side effect.
Sync has been part of their strategy for a while now, from revamping the whole iMessage stack to allow for sync, to their work on eSim etc. so the move doesn't break with their recent trends either.
Both Android and iOS support 3rd party password managers as the passkey store. Bitwarden with passkeys works seamlessly on both my iOS and Android devices (along with MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS).
If passkeys are intended for platform lock-in then Big Tech is doing a really bad job...
You make it sound like Apple needs to lock the door instead of just opening it while everyone else shoots themselves in the foot. For people who want "it just works" as the highest function of their device, nothing comes close to Apple. It's only people with a technical inclination or specific needs who chaff at that, or people like me who are just cranky old bastards who don't want their own media collection apart from i/Apple/Everything.
But man... I cannot tell you how many people don't even notice the walls of the garden. Besides Apple is in competition with some huge players, more than capable of offering "Done with Apple literally trapping you? Follow this link and we'll transfer your passkeys."
Most people still hanging to that part have already built a whole way of life around the Apple ecosystem and the boundaries and how to work around them have become second nature to them.
The iPhone is now near 20y old, the world also changed, most got enshitificated, and looking at kids and elderlies dealing with their iPhones and macs none of it "just works".
Looking at Japan, it was the bastion of iPhone predominance, but I'm the latest numbers 30+ yo gradually got off the train to move to android as their phone is just becoming another tool to them.
You said “it doesn’t” a whole lot, but unless I missed something you didn’t give any examples of what’s failing. From my own experience integration of peripherals is seamless within the ecosystem, and my elderly relatives never need tech support.
From the top of my head, try to share your Fitness data to someone on a regular basis. We bought our mother in law an Apple Watch and she asked us to remotely check her data from time to time. We gave up pretty fast.
I'm on Android and my kid got my old iPhone. Parental controls can't be set by me.
My Apple ID still tried to contact my old iPhone when logging in as a dev.
I don't need to expand on iMessage and where messages go, it's part of the lore at this point. My wife's airport auto-swirching was also a mess to the point she disabled it.
Google Maps' time line features get randomly shut off and you only know it way after the fact.
The list just goes on and on. I also have my frustrations on other platforms, I'm just pointing out Apple is far from being great. People just get used to the rough edges after a while and tout it as "good enough".
> Done with Apple literally trapping you? Follow this link and we'll transfer your passkeys.
That's the whole point of the FIDO specs. This is now literally impossible to do. All the vendors are weirdly okay with this I believe it's because it cuts both ways.
Except that this is not true. There is a FIDO specification for both a format and secure protocol for exchanging passwords and passkey information between password managers, with support on all Apple platforms, and implemented by 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and more:
We have more than enough technology in browsers to allow JavaScript reading live video from your webcam. A website could use that so they can see if you’re looking at the ads enough.
They could start doing it tomorrow. They just have to flip the switch.
Also worth point out that Apple consumer devices intentionally do not support attestation at all, and only support it for devices under enterprise management. That's still a dominant enough number of devices in the US at least that a consumer site seems unlikely to want to disable/break logins for all iOS and iPadOS users.
Even stronger, they used to support it, but now no longer do, so we know for a fact that Apple knows how to do attestation, has already expended all resources necessary to implement it, but has then actively decided to go into a different direction (i.e. that of cloud synchronization).
I believe Android still has the option to use hardware attestation, but that automatically opts credentials out of cross-device synchronization, but Apple's veto alone is enough to make attestation non-viable.
If this can't make the "WebAuthN implies mandatory attestation!!" critics update, I wonder if anything can, and how useful their criticism still is.
Why would they need to re-generate? Pretty much all websites are using copyable passkeys. The user just needs log in to their password manager on their new device. Which for most people just means logging in to their Apple or Google account. There is virtually no difference to storing generated passwords in a password manager or storing passkeys.
And the sad truth is: Most people have no password manager at all. They are used to re-generate new passwords every time they want to log in! I'd wager that on some websites the vast majority of people are loggin in by pressing "I forgot my password".
AFAIK the whole point of attested passkeys is that they are not copyable, which make it pointless to backup in apple cloud, which must be one of the main reason Apple decided to not go that route.
I am very hopeful that passkeys will fail overall. They've definitely forced a lot of adoption quickly, but I think also that a lot of people have no idea what they've signed up for, and there is a decent chance of a quiet, slow retraction in the long run. Their death will be well-earned by just the attestation alone - one hundred percent, in my opinion. I tell my loved ones to not use passkeys simply because they're much more likely to accidentally run into scenarios where they lose the device. I'm not going to stop. I encourage everyone to do the same.
I still am using passkeys for some sites because they otherwise force you into insecure processes like SMS-based 2FA with implied humiliation rituals, but banks are the worst offenders and they seem to like discriminating against open source password managers, so while they are not using attestation I am still patching my password manager to lie about its identity. Hopefully this will become more common in the future.
Be that as it may, they can still roll out the passkey attestation requirement gradually, -- "flip the switch" just a few thousand users at a time -- so that at no one point in time is there a large blip in users. Truth be told, tech platforms don't even really need to measure what portion of users' devices support remote attestation, since the overwhelming majority of devices will support it. They just need to know that users are passkey-capable in the first place; once enough users have passkeys in any form, they can start requiring remote attestation.
As for the browser permission prompt: Firefox simply warns you that the site is "requesting extended information about your security key [sic] which may affect your privacy." [1] It does not make it at all clear to the user that what's really happening is that the website is gating acces behind a specific approved software stack. If I use a non-widely-used OS or device, what website is going to approve its attestation credentials?
Sorry, bit this is just the standard "boil the frog" playbook that tech companies always use for user-hostile features. It's usually:
1) There is this new entirely optional feature, but it's not relevant to you, so feel free to ignore it.
2) The feature is now active by default, but no worries, there is a simple button for you to opt-out.
3) The feature is active by default, but because we value our users, there is an option in the advanced settings to deactivate it.
4) Our data shows that 99.9% of users activated the feature, but if you belong to the handful of diehards who still refuse to use it (rolls eyes), you can use this obscure command line flag or about:config entry to turn it off
5) Managing opt-out infrastructure for the feature has significant maintenance and security cost that we feel, we can no longer justify. Therefore, effective in three months, the opt-out flags will stop working and the feature will become mandatory. According to our metrics, this will affect 0.0001% of our users, so no disruption is expected.
The "there is something wrong with you if you are at all off the beaten path" has cropped up a lot more for me recently; two examples both from 2026:
1. You can't use Firefox with our website (when I got this popup, I thought I had been transported back in time 20 years, but with Chrome substituted for IE).
2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
2a. I ran some tests; it's the domain itself, not the host, so e.g. [email protected] is allowed but not a [email protected], even if hosted by google).
2b. After a bit of back-and-forth with support: "No, we won't tell you the list of allowed domains, but gmail and hotmail both will work."
> 2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.
The same thing exists for phone numbers. About 90% of my calls with US banks go like this:
"Ok, first, to verify you, what's your phone number?" (oh no, it's one of those, because why do they need to ask...) "<my phone number>" "Ok, you'll receive a te— oh. Oh no. This is not a real phone number. What's your REAL phone number?"
Vote with your wallet. I've only experienced two instances where systems wouldn't accept my custom email domain. One was a bank. I proceeded to close the account.
They don't care about how much older, more secure, more trustworthy and so on your domain is. That's not the issue they're having. The issue is that you are 'abnormal', and it is in the common interest of tech companies to make any signs of abnormality (read: not-total compliance to their whims) to be inherently suspicious and nefarious behavior that needs to be curtailed.
> The feature is now active by default, but no worries, there is a simple button for you to opt-out.
How I wish this were true for (US) banks. They usually force whatever new hell on you they just came up with without asking, or in fact even telling you about it.
The most bizarre instance I've seen so far: "We have unilaterally added this phone number we believe to be in your name (surely cell carriers have better KYC than we do!) to your account as the only SMS-OTP authentication method and are choosing to disregard the one we've had on file for years since it's an evil VoIP number. Please do not contact us again without access to the former number for authentication."
This is a great comment, and yes, the entire industry seems to keep doing this over and over.
My computers and devices feel less and less like tools under my control and doing my bidding, and more and more like something controlled by faraway tech companies, to do their bidding.
Oof, this comment convinced me to go from loving passkeys to "maybe I should be careful". However, I don't think these are technological issues, I think they're policy issues. We need to vote for freedom of computing, and against corporations doing whatever the hell they want.
Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.
The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.
I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.
In the UK, but parking quite often these days has machines that are out of order so please use one of these 500 apps "for your convenience".
At the market, there is a high cost to managing cash and so some of the small sellers will only accept cash reluctantly or not sell because they can't break notes.
Cash is basically dead here already; it's been months since I needed to go to an ATM and I no longer carry coins, apart from a few pounds in the car for parking. But even then parking is mostly cashless (yes, annoying app problem). Even the compressed air machine at the petrol station takes £1 contactless. Street food vendors etc seem to have gone cashless so they can avoid the inconvenience and cost of cash handling (banks hate taking coins).
Parking is a special case because the meters aren't attended by people.
Guarantee any individual market stall seller would rather take exact cash than not make a sale at all. Small firms might not, since their cashiers have to work in the process the owner sets. Owner-operators will do anything for money or soon go out of business.
Increasingly common at smaller businesses in western Washington (have seen this in Seattle, Bellingham, and occasionally elsewhere).
Even where it's "technically" possible, it's becoming more difficult. Some grocery stores around here don't staff traditional teller lanes at night, shrinking down to only self-checkout, which are card-only machines. To pay cash, you'll have to escalate to the roaming attendant (or at least, I assume they can find some way to accept cash for that transaction? I can't say I've tried)
Restaurants in big cities and sports stadiums.
It's called a cost saving effort, but with restaurants especially it's usually to discourage poor people from trying to come in.
I think some theme parks have started. Not accepting cash should be illegal, and certain places have started implementing laws that make the practice illegal. There are various reasons why a person is unable to have a bank account.
As mentioned super common in the UK but in the US nearly every sports/concert/event venue above a certain size is 100℅ cashless these days (on top of strictly requiring a specific mobile app to gain entry in the first place)
> the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions
This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.
Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.
Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.
Having read the very complicated WebAuthn spec so I could implement an RP, and participated in too many stupid debates about attestation like this one: multiple, simpler specs focused on specific use cases would have been better than a single gargantuan spec that tries to do everything.
There's also another scenario - annoy most users into using passkeys, then say "well everyone is using passkeys already, we don't need passwords anymore", and _then_ slowly start requiring attestation. Really I'm not one to look for conspiracy theories, but with the recent pushes around e.g. chat control, it's not that far fetched to assume someone pushes for more control over users' accounts
Would a website want you to have to use Apple Passwords to guarantee that the account you're creating is connected to an Apple account, and thus making it more likely that you're a real, non-anonymous human?
edit: Why not just require "Sign in with Apple/Google" if that's the goal?
I share that concern somewhat, but I think your point stands even better without suspecting some shadowy attestation cabal.
The US has thousands of banks, and nobody tells them how to authenticate their customers – they just all end up doing the same few horrible things, since nobody ever gets fired for doing what all their peers do (and maybe a little bit more to be sure).
It's not a conspiracy theory when it's just another instance of the patterns big tech has overtly used against us for 20 years now. We see, every day, a frog being stung by a scorpion when crossing the river. So we don't let scorpions ride on our frogs any more. No conspiracy theory, just pattern recognition.
"I'm different!" says this particular scorpion - yeah yeah, I don't believe you.
You are saying this as if these companies don't care about CVR or compatibility at all. The reality is that most companies are extremely conservative about pushing you to change your authentication method. Here are my observations, as both a user and an industry insider:
1. Many services have old users with passwords that predate password-strength meters (or their ill-conceived brethren: password complexity rules). The service provider knows these passwords keep falling, and the cost of having to deal with stolen accounts is very real: customer support calls, reimbursements and investigation. But I've rarely seen services that force users to upgrade their passwords (even though it's a very easy solution). Whenever I've offered doing this myself, it was always shut down (either immediately or 3 years down the line) by a myriad of seemingly unrelated stakeholders.
2. To go further than this, companies can also know for certain that some credentials have been leaked by looking at password breach aggregators like Have I been Pwned and forcing users with affected accounts to change their passwords. That too, is rarely done.
3. 2FA (with SMS or TOTP) has existed for ages now, yet very few major non-financial services have made 2FA mandatory by forcing you to register an authenticator app or a verified phone number[1].
4. Webauthn was available in Chrome and Firefox in 2018, and got pretty widespread support by 2020. The "Passkeys" brand was not a thing yet, but the basic functionality was there and both hardware and software support was quite solid. It still took several years for services to even start offering Webauthn to users, beyond small and limited trials. The rationale was simple: UX around Webauthn was still rough, syncing and transferring credentials were still unsolved and the worst part was "What do we even ask the user to do?". The broad concept of passkeys is extremely confusing, but the non-concept we had before was far more confusing. Supporting Webauthn back in 2020 would have given tremendous security benefits for power users who could have understood it and deal with the rougher UX back then, but nobody wanted to take the risk of regular users setting up a passkey, losing it and locking down their account.
5. Now that passkeys are being supported by more and more services, you still don't see them being pushed very hard. Passkeys are great for the service provider, since they just kill a big category of security incidents, but even then you're see pretty conservative adoption. And I've never seen a single service forcing you to use Passkeys.
My point in all these examples is that most companies are extremely conservative here. Forcing users to do something that might confuse them, break their account or frustrate them is risky, since you may lose a very real chunk of your customer base. Sometimes you have to do this, the costs from keeping the old way or the benefits or forcing the change have to be high enough to justify that. Think about how long it took for companies to drop support for IE6. The cost was high, but as long as it still had a sizable market share, it was hard to do. Google was probably the first major company to take steps towards killing IE6 support, and this was famously entirely bottom-up, and was done by engineers either hiding it from their bosses or tricking them[2].
With this trend. I personally find the scenario where non-copyable attested passkeys are forced on everyone unlikely. OP keeps mentioning Netflix, but streaming services are a rather special case, most service providers would get very little benefit from restricting users to an attested non-copyable passkey. Why would they risk all that friction for... nothing at all?
The more real risk with attestations (and we're already started seeing it) is that some services (namely banks) will use attestations to limit you to use their own shitty app instead of using a proper passkey.
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[1] Keep in mind I'm only talking about companies that already had password-based accounts without 2FA. Companies that started out with a simple username and password are rarely forcing their users to add 2FA. The farthest they generally went is sending you an OTP code or link on a verified email address they already had, and this is usually only done for sensitive operations, a new browser and/or a suspicious location.
Email OTPs, notably, aren't 2FA by definition, since your Email address might be only password-protected, and at the worst case (and excruciatingly common) scenario it might be sharing exactly the same password as your service. Companies would love to have all their users using a stronger solution, so they can stop having to deal with all these pesky credential stuffing botnets, but not at the cost of losing a non-negligible portion of their customer base.
I've yet to voluntarily enable passkeys, for the main reason that I want portability, and not to be tied to any single device that can be lost. I want to be able to backup and lock my credentials in a safe. I also want to control the strength of my credentials for different services, and I don't consider my thumbprint used to unlock my phone to be as strong as a long password in a password manager.
The first time I was forced to use a passkey implemented within the vendor's app (3rd party password managers were not an option). I quickly closed that account.
The second time was an app that popped up a passkey opt-in in the middle of a bunch of transaction screens. I quickly realized the error, but there was no easy undo. The opt in was one green button in the middle of the screen. Turning it back off required digging through settings to find the security option to disable, and then confirm my choice multiple times. That process also signed out all my other devices.
The fact that companies are resorting to dark patterns and forced requirements, where my money is held hostage, should be pretty good evidence of how poorly the passkey rollout is going.
You can put your passkey in another safe. I store mine in my vaultwarden. You can also do keepass with a plugin. You don't have to store it on your phone.
There is no truly secure options for this, unfortunately. Passkeys have to be online to enroll additional keys, so any kind of software or smartphone solution is going to depend completely on cloud sync. Any form of offline copy stored in a physical safe will quickly be outdated.
It gets even worse when you want to have separate passkeys, so that you have the possibility of knowing which one was compromised and doing a partial revocation: the cloud sync now requires every device to have access to every copy, so that you can individually enroll them during registration.
Yubikey of course suffers most from this, as their hardware tokens are physically incapable of any kind of sync, so a Yubikey passkey is very quickly a single-point-of-failure. They proposed[0] a system which would allow enrolling a "backup key" (which could then be safely locked in a vault, far away from day-to-day use), but with the various Big Tech companies pushing their own proprietary cloud-synced passkey implementations that of obviously went nowhere.
> Passkeys have to be online to enroll additional keys
No they don't? A passkey is fundamentally just a private key pair, which can be copied around just like a very long password. Of course if you store it inside one hardware enclave and want to move it to another hardware enclave you have a problem, but for software implementations it's simply a client UX issue.
I think "online" here means "loaded in a device", as opposed to "sitting in a safe".
The protocol requires additional keys to sign a challenge during registration, so at best you have to load a pre-generated key from the safe when creating a new account. In practice, you generate a new key for every account, so between generating the key and storing it in your safe there's no backup but cloud sync.
This prevents using backup storage that is safer but inconvenient to access, and also prevents registering accounts on-the-go.
> "Online" in the sense of "loaded in a device", as opposed to "sitting in my safe".
The "device" can be entirely virtual. I've written a passkey-compatible OIDC provider for use on my homelab and it uses passkeys. But the passkeys are just in a SQLite database, which can be copied wherever.
That's not advisable for security, which is one reason I've not released the provider for others to use, but passkeys can operate just fine with that.
If I wanted, the private key itself just be in something like AWS KMS instead of a SQLite database, and it would all still work fine. Nothing about passkeys itself requires a hardware device or that the key be unexportable.
Most website implementations that support passkeys have to support multiple key enrollment. It's the only long-term reliable way for the many, many users that are cross-ecosystem, which especially means Windows users in the age of no Windows Phone. Every Windows user has either an Android or iPhone. You can bootstrap with Bluetooth LTE access to your phone for a Passkey, but it's a rough web experience if the user needs to do that every time they access a page, so most good flows ask the user the enroll a Windows PC passkey in addition to their phone's passkey and really good ones make use of a passkey auto-enrollment option designed for this scenario (Bluetooth passkey to "local" passkey auto-enrollment).
Perhaps surprisingly, Windows has helped keep Passkeys from being "proprietary" lock-in because Microsoft no longer has users in a single ecosystem.
There is no dedicated auto-enrollment for "backup" keys, but most consumer sites make it very easy to enroll "backup" keys yourself.
Also, Passkeys don't have to be "online" to enroll additional keys. Each key is independent, enrolling is just generating new keys. The trouble is that web browsers generate lots of Passkeys (at least one per domain, at the very least) so if you in theory want to print them all and store them in a physical vault it might be a hefty book you are printing.
Cloud sync isn't required. Most users want it so that they don't have a single-point-of-failure.
As an implementation detail some Passkeys have a master key that is then used in some key derivation function (KDF) to generate the hundreds or thousands of individual passkeys (at least one per domain), and that's what most Yubikey passkey implementations need to do because Yubikeys weren't designed to store lots of keys, so it is devices like Yubikey that makes it seem like Passkeys are less independent than they really are.
> so a Yubikey passkey is very quickly a single-point-of-failure
It is a single point of failure when there is one. As soon as you use two, then it's not a single point a failure anymore, is it?
The counter argument I usually read is: "Yeah but it is not practical, because you need 3 yubikeys: the first 2 with you, that you enroll everywhere, and one in a safe. And every time you add a new passkey, you need to go get the one in the safe, replace it by another one, and enroll the one of the safe. You can't spend your life driving between your desk and your safe".
But I have been using multiple Yubikeys for... 8 years now I think? I don't remember the last time I enrolled and important key. Sure, once in a while I add a website, and it is a bit annoying to have to enroll the other Yubikeys at a different time. But it really doesn't happen that often, and anyway most of those websites allow me to recover my account with my email. So it is actually practical to have a "convenience yubikey" for websites that don't matter so much, and in case this Yubikey dies... well those websites were not so important, and anyway I can recover from my email.
The difference for the important websites (and really, I don't think I have really important websites in my life that don't allow me to recover by going in person with my ID, but for the sake of the argument) is that I actually do have multiple Yubikeys, one of which is stored away.
Whereas the master password of my Bitwarden account is a single point of failure, and the security of my online Bitwarden account is as well.
That's a clever setup that I hadn't seen before. Some extra downsides:
- Relying on emails for account recovery has the downside of preventing anonymous accounts.
- Have you ever lost your "convenience yubikey"? People underestimate how painful mass account recovery can be.
- The cost of 3 yubikeys can be substantial for some demographics.
- Important accounts are not properly backed up until you drive to your safe. That can be many days for a bank deposit box, or even longer if you're traveling.
Overall that's a lot of compromises for what should have been just "put this recovery key/password in a safe and forget about it until needed", if the protocol was better. And definitely not something that can be widely recommended.
> I have been using multiple Yubikeys for... 8 years now I think? I don't remember the last time I enrolled and important key.
This probably makes your use case somewhat unusual...
> I actually do have multiple Yubikeys, one of which is stored away.
...and this probably puts you in the 0.0001th or so percentile of users. It's really a great security strategy if you can pull it off, but practically almost nobody can.
Not sure what you mean. "Normal people" have to enroll important keys much more often, and cannot use multiple Yubikeys?
My feeling would be that "normal people" can always recover their accounts from their main email, which makes the main email the only "important" account. So having a Yubikey always plugged in is a "nice convenience".
Now to be honest, I would expect that "normal people" are absolutely fine with passkeys on their smartphone, and don't consider it a "trap".
I would just expect that people who consider it a trap are able to use a Yubikey the way I do.
I use Yubikeys for WebAuthn 2FA (not as passkeys). Keeping them in sync is not a big issue in practice: I just don't sign up for new services that often. There's a stable set of services I'm using and it is rare that I actively look for something new. Usually it is the other way around--how do I use this thingamajig without creating an account.
Why would cloud sync never be "truly secure" (no such thing btw – security is always a tradeoff, availability also matters etc.)? A hardware root of trust and credential synchronization are not mutually exclusive.
True, most solutions today don't do this, which makes onboarding of fraudulent additional instances to some cloud-synced vault a big security concern, but I don't think it's fundamentally impossible.
Passkeys are just a private key plus some metadata.
Bitwarden lets you export your vault, and the export contains the private key in plain text. There is virtually no difference to writing down a password on a piece of paper. Well, I guess a passkey is a lot longer than the avg password.
This changes if attestation ever becomes widespread. Which will only happen if Apple does a U-turn on their stance.
> There is virtually no difference to writing down a password on a piece of paper. Well, I guess a passkey is a lot longer than the avg password.
The big difference is not just that a passkey is a private key, it's that the server you register the passkey within holds only the corresponding public key. They don't have a copy of your password (long or otherwise), not even a hashed version of it that could be recovered from a password database dump of the server.
This is a big improvement compared to the days of having your "strong password" end up on the dark web somewhere.
Can you export it from there? My main gripe with passkeys in 1Password is that seemingly you can't export them, unless you export it to "someone else", which isn't clear if that someone can be just "you".
Right, what if I don't know yet what password manager I want to move to? Can I just get the data or I'm only allowed to move this thing into something else I also don't actually own?
I do not know the answer to your question but mine are in Vaultwarden. This probably means I have access to them. The method to get them out might end up not being pretty but it should be possible.
Same for me.. I don't want my login information to be tied to a particular device, or device vendor. TOTP is a clear winner in all of this. Minor inconvenience, but highly secure and portable.
A password manager solves this problem. I use 1password but there are others, including open source solutions. Passkeys for me are by far the most convenient form of MFA-based authentication.
Third parties manage nearly all my money, my future wealth, the quality of the water I drink, etc.
Yes you need to put thought into who you trust to provide password management but for most people having a professional third party help them improve how they use passwords will be a benefit to security overall.
Silicon Valley suffers an utter lack of comprehension of the concept of consent. As another commenter pointed out some time ago, if we were in a nightclub they'd be the creepy guy that keeps coming up to you asking:
> I've yet to voluntarily enable passkeys, for the main reason that I want portability, and not to be tied to any single device that can be lost.
For any given Passkey-enabled service you use, you can have multiple Passkeys - ideally one per device, and it doesn't prevent you from also authenticating with another method, such as username and password.
The very last thing, past the conclusion, the very last footnote is:
> Addendum: I feel I have made a compelling case for passkeys in this article. And I haven’t even pointed out one of their best security features: they are (in most use cases) domain-bound, meaning they are resistant to what are called Man-In-The-Middle attacks.
"I made a compelling case... but didn't point out the most important security feature that motivated passkeys in the first place"
Honestly I don't think this post did make a compelling case. There's a lot of assuming bad faith on the part of the FIDO alliance, while completely missing that preventing MITM attacks was a key design feature. The FIDO alliance members deal with stolen accounts all the time, and passkeys largely solve that. Stealing accounts is almost always done with phishing or social engineering, and passkeys solve the former and reduce the surface for the latter.
I sort of started skimming when the article was saying industry solved the problem with text messages and TOTP. I think there are several arguable problems with Passkeys as implemented, but to argue TOTP is equivalent is going to leave lots of people vulnerable.
The protections against MITM you mentioned is probably the biggest one, but the other one in the back of my mind is TOTP is a shared secret. So a compromise of the server side allows impersonation of users undetected, which can be a big problem. Maybe I'm over reacting because no company has ever lost a copy of it's database and they're all super secure. But, imagine trying to argue as a user I didn't do a thing when there is an audit log saying we challenged the user for TOTP and it was provided, was definitely the users fault.
I think it's rather this millenium's "just check the domain really carefully". You can't choose a weak TOTP, write it on a post it or share TOTPs on multiple websites. The main (only?) failure mode is that you type it in an attacker-controlled input.
Highly economy specific. Ease varies by nation state. Social engineering attacks in Australia are far LESS common than they used to be and I believe other economies in Asia and Europe all have less than the USA.
If you aren't talking from a US perspective, where are you that SIM swap is a low bar?
Passkeys are unphishable. It’s technically impossible for someone else to capture your passkey and use it themselves. It’s technically impossible for your passkey to be leaked from a website.
This is what makes Passkeys the superior solution - they bake the security into itself rather than throwing up its hands and hoping all the other weakest links do the right thing consistently.
> Especially considering how easy it still is to do a SIM swap.
Heh.
Several months ago, I found myself in need of a new phone. I even had the means to do an orderly transition, with the old one still in hand and mostly working.
My mobile provider was an MVNO that was also my home ISP. I had enabled "enhanced security" to prevent ev0l hackerz from swapping my SIM without authorization. It turns out that this mode is so secure that it prevented me and the support staff from a normal upgrade procedure.
There were various glitches along the way, and a conversation with certain LLMs indicated that the SIM->eSIM disparity was also causing trouble, and with the online system's rejection of authentication I decided it was expedient to walk into their nearby storefront location.
It turns out that the salespeople in the storefronts are not really empowered in any technical way, except they were quite capable of changing my password without any reason, and wasting my time, so leaving the store empty-handed after mind games from three haughty female STEM dropouts was rather infuriating.
The process eventually succeeded after giving it a little time, space, and grace, but it looks like I'm leaving "enhanced security" disabled if it's so customer-hostile.
That's been my experience, too. I don't remember the store worker's details, though. I'm curious how the gender of the STEM dropouts affected the process.
If the credentials get stolen from a website database, they’re useless for every other website on earth. No matter how poorly they’re stored, it’s just a public key and is not useful. Hell, they can get code executing on the webserver that collects full login information, and it’s not useful.
Passwords always require full transmission. Hashing for storage requires a proper implementation, which we’ve seen does not happen. 100% of the time. There’s a reason hackers are still stealing passwords from websites after three decades.
Passkeys solve that. Nothing else available to the average user does.
We have been trying to get users to use good passwords since passwords were invented, and still haven't managed to get them to use unique passwords. It clearly doesn't work.
You know what MITM is, yes? There are a ton of points between you and that hash algorithm, and any single one immediately and permanently compromises you.
>There's a lot of assuming bad faith on the part of the FIDO alliance
Yeah, it's just a bunch of "big company bad!"
Yes, Google and Twitter and Yahoo are just trying to get your data and sell ads, but I fail to see how Passkeys furthers that specific goal. Even if these companies have bad motivations in certain parts of their business, they all have an incentive to make accounts more secure (to reduce fraud) and improve the user experience (to increase engagement/happiness)
I noticed that too. This also seems like a bit of an insult to the intelligence level of the average person. It’s precisely because attestation is a nuclear weapon that I doubt one of the big three will try it outside of their own specialized credentials. If someone tries to change ecosystems and finds that they’re going to have to reset all their passkeys it’s not going to take long for them to tell all their friends that passkeys suck and not to use them. This instantly kills adoption.
Furthermore, the rest of us are the people at the companies implementing passkeys. I did an implementation recently, didn’t require attestation, and can’t imagine why I ever would.
If we’re at this level of trust for all of FIDO, why aren’t we at legislative centers doing something much more dramatic about it instead of navel gazing about how we’re the smart ones who have recognized FIDO’s next big trick? How is attestation the problem here?
Users constantly fall for website impersonation, this can be solved by your password manager it just has to check the host and the certificate of the login page.
Now browsers don't let password managers do that, I wonder why.
But lets say you don't like the fact that passwords are sent over the wire. I get that I don't like that either. You could just take a random token and have an hmac signature on all your requests, for most cryptographic hashing functions that would probably be quantum secure as well.
But lets just say you don't want to have a shared secret because you know servers get hacked all the time. Totally legit, I like the way you think, asymmetric cryptography it is.
How could we possibly do it? Like ssh with pki on top.
The spec could be literally these 25 words:
Do what ssh does but request a PKI signed certificate instead of a key signature from the server and validate it against your known CAs.
Passkeys are the consumer implementation of PKI to solve these problems.
There's functionally no alternative for consumer logins, and certainly not one that doesn't require learning what PKI is. "like SSH with PKI" is a bit "draw the rest of the owl".
PKI is already in place for domain verification. SSh with PKI is exactly what it sounds like, "passkeys" without attestation, hardware, corporate bullshit.
This is the entire usability/footgun issue with SSH public keys. For the tech savvy being able to copy and paste id_ed25519.pub into their online account settings would be a dream. But who will train the masses to do that? A lot of people would accidentally paste their private key. Just like how journalists learning OpenPGP emailed over their private key compromising it. For low tech savvy people having direct access to key material is an anti-feature. They can lose it. They can leak it or be phished into giving it up. They don't want to manually sync it between devices or generate per device keys and enroll all of them. Then companies exploit this need for user friendly design to create vendor lock in.
My point is your browser, password manager could do just that, all the attestation, hardware keys, required user confirmation etc, authorized clients etc are all a power ploy from FIDO to own peoples authentication.
> this can be solved by your password manager it just has to check the host and the certificate of the login page
Which is exactly what Passkeys does. And it also has built-in functionality to prevent any kind of "Oops! We changed our login method, just ignore the warning and retrieve it manually." social engineering, which a user would often genuinely see when random services move their login page to a different url.
Why is your grandpa or fictional billions users being MITM’d?
Passkeys are an end run on general purpose hardware largely under your own control, which is a much bigger issue in scale than dealing with customers who can’t access the services they pay for because of some byzantine security or know your customer laws/procedures.
Santander UK sends its 'don't fall for a phishing scam' etc. emails from yoursantander2.co.uk or something stupid like that that's not what you ever interact with.
For their bank accounts, search tech support scam on youtube to see how that goes. Btw passkeys do nothing to stop this, they probably make it easier since grandpa doesn't have to search for a password or unlock a password manager to send his money to the scammers.
And if the bank implements the best form of Passkey (and implements it well) in this case it would require the user to biometrically authenticate before sending money (perhaps based on dollar amount or transaction volume) to a new account. The user would hopefully learn over time that the biometric requirement is aligned with money transfers and would grow suspicious if they were prompted for it during a scam session.
I bought a house earlier this year and the bank froze my deposit I sent to the real estate agent.
I rang the bank straight away and badgered them to unlock it ASAP in case the sale fell through for their BS fraud department to sift it.
They blamed the fact the real estate they’d never transacted with before, I politely told them they’re based in one state while I was purchasing in another.
It took 2 hours of back and forth to get them to send it, even after they did all their security questions.
It’s all a fugazi, they/governments do not want you having large amounts of money - it’s as simple as that.
Actually it's kind of the opposite. Right now the banks know how easy it is for someone to end up getting scammed, so they try to be really strict on picking up on potentially fraudulent transactions precisely because they can't trust endpoint security.
If they have something like this in place, they will have greater confidence in the transaction being genuine and less likely to block it. In this case, for such a large amount of money, relative to the size of your account, they might still be very cautious about it, but it would be less likely to cause an issue.
I'm not sure I follow this point? A trojan would fail to exfiltrate passkeys (assuming they're stored securely). It would be able to see a valid login and potentially use that session or exfiltrate the session, but wouldn't be able to get persistent account access. This seems better than stealing a password and getting persistent account access, or possibly stealing a TOTP code for the same. It's bad, but I think it's made better by passkeys? Unless I'm misunderstanding your point.
A trojan would succeed in using your session and potentially start sessions from your device in cases where your key does not require your confirmation or where they have found a bug to bypass that (it maybe as simple as providing simulated input events to the system).
My point is the gains are overstated the main weakness is almost always user action. Passkeys will not magically solve all our security problems.
You want corporations to get more into law enforcement? These things are already crimes, law enforcement agencies already go after them. Would I like more public funding for that? Absolutely. When we've solved crime then let's go back to using passwords, or even just usernames at that point, after all no one will hack them.
Because it prevents an attacker from stealing the password. It's both extremely hard to "steal" a passkey, and to phish a login from one. Neither of those are true for passwords, and TOTP only partially solves the stealing part.
Passkeys aren't solving for security nerds who like portability and have 30 character long passwords, they're solving for grandpa who will happily read their bank's 2FA SMS to the "bank" over the phone. The FIDO alliance has literally billions more of these users than they do users who know what hardware attestation is and how it impacts their auth workflows.
The security requirements are generally hidden from users. I have never noticed different behaviour between my passkeys.
But as I said, there are plenty of UX issues with passkeys, those UX issues however don't include getting your accounts hacked, phished, passwords lost in data breaches, etc, which I'd suggest are a lot worse.
We don't need attestation and most of the data bits. Apple consumer devices don't support attestation. Only Apple enterprise managed devices do. It's a paranoia tool for big enterprises with strict device management requirements. Apple has a lot of good reasons to believe attestation is a privacy violation for consumers and seems likely to keep up the good fight in making sure it remains an enterprise-only tool.
So companies can use passkeys and set policies around what hardware they're stored on. IMHO, not particularly useful or desirable for everyday Internet users, but really nice if you have specific requirements.
I’m an advocate for passkeys and I abolished passwords and embraced discoverable passkeys for our org’s key internal systems exclusively. So the battle cry of a title immediately put me on the defensive, unfortunately. The urge to not read is strong. A more measured title may help here.
But there’s definitely a kernel of truth here. 1Password recently began to enforce userVerification: required[1][2], and suddenly on the desktop without TouchID I have to enter my login password to use the passkey on a good number of websites. I didn’t sign up for 1Password 15 years ago so that I have to enter both my very complex master password and very complex login password to sign into websites, the “one password” contract is suddenly broken after 15 years. This experience independently alarmed me about the additional constraints potential of the passkey standard and power wielded by the FIDO Alliance and partnering organizations addressed in TFA, which are, to be clear, useful for security in an organization. (We use userVerification: preferred now btw.)
Therefore, I believe the passkey technology is great for enforcing a standard of security in an organization and stand by my choice for my org. But as a general purpose B2C auth tech, if the additional constraints become widely adopted, user freedom will be seriously harmed.
Edit: I asked Opus 5.5 to vibe code a passkey auth solution in Go a few times without saying anything specific about userVerification. It chose required each time. So expect to see more of these. Oh and vibe coding auth without understanding it entirely is bad, please don’t do that.
1Password suddenly offering to save passkeys without mentioning that they can't be exported to other apps (but are seamlessly synced between devices using 1Password) is what lost them "good guys" status in my mind.
It immediately creates a huge lock-in in a hard-to-notice way. Luckily, I did noticed early on and manually removed the 20 or so passkeys I had created.
Earlier this year, I lost my iPhone and restored from backup. I was shocked to see that I could log into my 1Password account using only the master-key, and that the secret-key was not required. 1Password clearly stated that the secret-key was required to setup a new device, but it turns out that they also (perhaps recently) configure it to upload to all devices in your iCloud account[1]. Ever since then, I've lost faith in 1Password's ability to communicate their security model to me and started looking for an off-ramp.
For passkey export, there is a FIDO specification for both a format and secure protocol for exchanging passwords and passkey information between password managers, with support on all Apple platforms, and implemented by 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and more:
For the iCloud syncing, I believe they've done that since iCloud Keychain/Apple Passwords was first a thing; I've been aware of it since they introduced it, but perhaps that was more explicit when it was first added. The comment below from a now-defunct 1Password employee account describes the thinking there:
> Importantly, the entire role of the Secret Key is to protect you from us and anything that might happen on our end, like a breach of 1Password’s servers. It does not (and can not) protect you from a local attack. This is mentioned in 1Password’s Security Design white paper [ed: on page 74 of an old PDF; I've linked the newer HTML document below], which goes into detail about the locally exposed Secret Key.
I do get why that might be surprising. Without going through the whole onboarding process on a fresh device I can't say how well they highlight that or how easy it is to blow past. All I can say is 1) I've known about it for years and 2) having read through the white paper of how iCloud Keychain works I _personally_ trust iCloud Keychain/Passwords about as much as I trust 1Password, maybe _slightly_ more - but I am also not a security professional, so take my word with very little salt :)
To be explicit, 1password did not offer passkey export for more than a year after they were introduced. 4 years later, here is 1password's page on exporting your data[1]. It says:
You can only export passkeys in 1Password for iOS and Android at this time.
So that's not great. Let's look at their page on the 1pux export[2]:
Your data is yours. If you want to export your data from 1Password for any reason, you can.
And the word "passkey" does not appear on that page. Why are these docs still written like this after 4 years?
And for the record, this is not impossible. Bitwarden does it[3] via the magic of "ignoring the part of the specification that says not to give users their data." Any open source software would do the same. This is why 1Password is no longer the "good guys" despite having rationalizations for their actions.
> For passkey export, there is a FIDO specification for both a format and secure protocol for exchanging passwords and passkey information between password managers, with support on all Apple platforms, and implemented by 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and more.
Does (more) here include free software like keepassxc and friends which don't restrict what key owners do with their keys? Last I heard, FIDO was moving to ban them.
Regarding just the iCloud syncing, I appreciate the additional color.
Though, I do find it amusing that I commented about 1password's inability to communicate their security model, and your reply links a reddit post[1] in which everyone is disagreeing over whether or not iCloud secret key syncing actually occurs.
Oh, also, the firefox extension recently rolled out this feature, I think it was default-enabled:
> Use universal sign in for logins
> Our next-generation autofill combines all login types into a single sign in prompt.
What the f does 'next-generation' mean? No link for more information. Obviously I have to turn it off, else for all I know it will start setting up passkeys (now or in a future update) or do something else anti-user. And it also means that I need to be careful about updates to 1password. Sad to watch my relationship with my password manager go downhill.
For all I can tell it simply moved the popup widget from below the actual input to the top middle of the page, and now preemptively prompts a lot more aggressively, sometimes not even on a sign-in page.
The vibecoding part is probably because "userVerification: required" is essential to have it work somewhat-securely as your sole form of security - like Passkeys is heavily promoting. Without it anyone with physical access to the device can use it to log in. This might not be so bad for a password manager which already has strict session password requirements and short timeout periods of its own, but it is a completely different story with, say, a Yubikey.
If you're building a Passkey-based login page and you specify "userVerification: preferred" or "userVerification: discouraged" you are essentially reducing your security to a single factor - namely the "something you have" one.
The vibe coding attempts I tried weren’t passwordless. For the actual passwordless internal system, AAGUID is checked so only whitelisted password managers are allowed, “something you have” hardware keys are not accepted. I know AAGUID can be spoofed but employee somehow hacking part of the process just to register a hardware key against policy isn’t really part of the threat model.
The change to 1Pass is annoying and I don't mention these to discount your valid concerns with it, only to make people aware of the options that can help with this and make it less taxing than continuously entering a password:
* On Windows you can enable Windows Hello for biometric authentication.
* On Mac, as shit as it is, you can buy Apple's magic keyboard with TouchID (for crazy money, but still) and use it while the notebook is shut.
I hope 1Password can eventually consider adding something like face recognition from a webcam as an alternative method.
Unfortunately, without this they are not compliant and it gives a false sense of security to claim it is multi-factor when it's actually only one factor. You'll find the same with other Passkey stores like Kevault that require biometrics as well.
Yeah I thought about getting a Magic Keyboard with TouchID for this, but ultimately decided against being strong armed into replacing my beloved keyboard for a decade plus with one I may not like. And I happen to like Apple’s keyboards (at least the early mid 2010s ones) and sport an old Magic Keyboard; it’s even less of an option for people who swear by loud mechanical keyboards with long key travel.
If you have or acquire an Apple Watch - yes, I know, it's a _different_ several hundred dollar device - and enable the "unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch" feature, it will function in _just_ about every place that Touch ID is required, including the 1Password Touch ID prompts. Like some other Apple functionality, it does some sort of fancy Wi-Fi/Bluetooth time-in-flight calculations to ensure the watch is close by before it unlocks your Mac, with a tap on the wrist and a button to re-lock your Mac if needed; and it requires a double-tap on the side button for application authentication prompts.
Huh I didn’t realize that feature worked with Mac Studio & mini too, thought it’s MacBook only. Definitely a solution for some. I have one gathering dust since the benefit of feeling nothing on my wrist outweighs the value it provides, after wearing one for a couple years.
Opinion from someone who's working on Passkeys at Apple and is very open and transparent about his work there (For many years already), which is rare for someone working at Apple. This makes me appreciate this much more.
I follow this person on Mastodon. They are a known advocate of passkeys. Working on the same thing for many years can certainly cloud one’s judgement. Here are their three points and my opinion:
> 1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!)
This is a matter of opinion. Personally I think making a technology understandable is more important than incomprehensible but secure.
> 2. Describing TOTP as a “great solution” for adding security to a password-based account. When the most common threat model on the web is phishing (a word the post never mentions!), TOTP hardly buys you _anything_. TOTP is phishable.
Phishing isn’t a big threat to regular consumers. It’s a bigger threat to workers at corporations and government agencies. These places have IT departments. They have better solutions than passkeys, including using a Yubikey as a second factor. It may be based on WebAuthn but it’s not a passkey.
> 3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed.
Why are the logical leaps? I don’t see any. What I see is clearly delineated hypotheses for future scenarios. We can’t predict the future but the original author is predicting a particularly dire future, whereas rmondello is predicting a better future.
> Phishing isn’t a big threat to regular consumers.
Can you back that up with data? Anecdotally regular people get phished all the time, why do you think banks are sending out frequent reminders, show banners on their websites and apps about phishing attempts in the wild and mail providers explicitly showing if something is an official Google / Fastmail communication and when it's not.
When I see phishing mail they are always for banking, Google / iCloud accounts and not specifically targeted at "corporate" or government agencies.
This is a (very long and) well-written treatise against passkeys in their common and disparate forms. It's worth reading, and brings up several interesting and often concerning points.
I don't agree with the conclusion, though.
TOTP is great, flexible, and keeps the user in control; however, using a passkey in a flexible password manager (Bitwarden, keepass, 1Password, etc) really does continue to give the user control. And the user experience is dramatically easier than filling in TOTP codes.
To advocate for TOTP over passkeys, we're already relying on an application to generate those numbers (authenticator apps, password managers, etc). I see no reason to not simply continue using those pieces of software to manage passkeys, too.
> using a passkey in a flexible password manager (Bitwarden, keepass, 1Password, etc) really does continue to give the user control. And the user experience is dramatically easier than filling in TOTP codes.
See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50049311 about userVerification: required. Passkey in 1Password used to be on par or slightly more difficult than filling in TOTP codes (need to click to approve rather than browser extension autofill and even auto-submit on a large number of websites) but that’s no longer true with a good number of websites requiring userVerification. Now you have to type in your login password on desktops without biometrics. Forum thread: https://www.1password.community/1password-at-home-31/user-ve...
That's entirely a problem with one implementation and not the standard. It's like complaining Torx is bad because one manufacturer adds stabby bits to the handles of their Torx screwdriver.
I can't use a passkey on a device unless I can install my password manager on that device and I am comfortable giving that device access to my passkeys. Passwords are simply unparalleled in their flexibility. You're never going to be locked out because <bluetooth, your TPM, your phone, ...> isn't working today.
I think the bit about TOTP was mostly a joke, the problem with passkeys is that they're billed as a replacement for passwords but they mix lots of MFA concerns in and make interoperability essentially impossible a lot of the time.
> I can't use a passkey on a device unless I can install my password manager on that device and I am comfortable giving that device access to my passkeys.
That's simply not true. I'm able to log onto GitHub on my corporate device using a passkey that's kept in 1Password on my iPhone.
That's fine if you've got a couple of supported devices. The hardware support is however very bad. If my hardware is unsupported (and most hardware in the world is unsupported) that's not very helpful.
This "use a passcode from another device such as my phone" tech mentioned above is just Bluetooth LTE. Every phone and most laptops and desktops in the last decade or so has Bluetooth LTE support. Hardware support is very good.
Passkeys are built on Webauthn (and ultimately sort of synonymous with it) and that has always been the web standard for all physical key support such as Yubikey and is basically the same as it has been for decades when dealing with Passkeys only with updated UX on top. Hardware support here is pretty good, too.
That's not really true, a QR code pops up, and you can use your other device to read it.
Even if your other device is a mainframe computer thousands of miles away, so long as you can photograph the QR code, you can decode it and send the data string for the passkey device needs to it.
The issue that many have with passkeys is that someone will tie a passkey to an ecosystem that they don't personally control like Apple's and then they can't get into their services without an apple device that's onboarded into Apple's ecosystem.
The other device has to respond "in nearby radio space" via Bluetooth LTE when using the QR code bootstrap, but that's about the only requirement and it can be just about any device.
But you can be locked out if the provider decides you need to change your password after a breach, or you forget the password, or you enter the wrong password in too many times.
They’re both equally disposable. You can reset a password just like you can reset a passkey.
I completely agree that KeePassXC and other password managers give you total user control, and they do support "passkeys" -- but crucially, not all kinds of passkeys. KeePassXC has no remote attestation support, nor hardware-backing support, and nor do I think it should.
My claim is not that passkeys couldn't give you control in principle. It's that the standard readily allows for websites to prevent you from being allowed to exercise that control, and the unclear messaging and UX around passkeys means most users will not even notice should this happen.
That has nothing to do with the standard. Any website can invent its own proprietary authentication extension and try to force it on its users. If a website wanted attestation and the standard didn't have it, they'd just make their own extension. See Apple with Thunderbolt.
> using a passkey in a flexible password manager (Bitwarden, keepass, 1Password, etc) really does continue to give the user control.
Sure, but if you read the article you would know that deal can (and will undoubtedly) be altered. The passkey issuer can demand that the passkey be hardware-backed, and I've already run into passkeys that cannot be stored in bitwarden out in the wild (i.e. they REQUIRE that I use a TPM-backed store in my computer). Eventually it will be a particular TPM-backed store running on an attested platform. Now that's not generally the case today, but make no mistake, that IS the ultimate goal... You will only access valuable services from devices that you fundamentally have no control over (e.g. locked down OS's with attestation before you can access X,Y,Z), so that you can't steal from netflix, skip the sponsor segments on youtube, block ads in your web browser, etc. etc. etc. If you want a preview of how this might all work from the technical side, just look into how TEE works for large-scale GPU deployments right now.
Unfortunately I can see Apple eventually getting onboard too. As in "Sorry your device is no longer secure for using passkeys. Please update to a newer device!" Nice little incentive to boost flagging iphone sells.
Except that banks can (and do) already require proprietary apps to generate one-time passwords, often requiring official iOS and Android phones. It's not some nebulous future, it's happening now.
And you can't really blame them. A TOTP 2FA from your password manager is not secure. It WILL be hacked sooner rather than later. And SMS is horrible, expensive, and unreliable.
So far, only FIDO keys provide hardware-backed security ("resident keys", not passkeys) that is nicely segregated into self-contained hardware module. And it does not require you to run a full end-to-end DRM-ed stack.
If you _want_ true privacy and security, that's pretty much the best case you can hope for.
Except that those "self-contained hardware modules" are actually rarely "self-contained" but usually an integral part of a smartphone running a huge bunch of mostly-untrusted code and that the containment keeps getting breached, of course.
The only difference is that banks will now blame you for any losses caused by hacked devices because it is on paper "unhackable" with a well-updated device, so it is now your fault that their crappy bank app's security was broken.
And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.
I'm using a Yubikey that is permanently plugged into a USB-C port on my laptop and another one in my dock at home.
> Except that those "self-contained hardware modules" are actually rarely "self-contained" but usually an integral part of a smartphone running a huge bunch of mostly-untrusted code and that the containment keeps getting breached, of course.
And it actually doesn't matter if the secure device is designed correctly. Providing a secure channel over untrusted networks is something that we can do easily.
> And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.
I can. I'm using US Bank and it supports my Yubikey-bound WebAuthn credential just fine.
It's unfortunately full of half-truths which are not even necessary to make the point it's trying to make about attestation, so it's the opposite for me: Bad article, (somewhat) valid conclusion.
> TOTP is great, flexible, and keeps the user in control
TOTP is vulnerable to MITM attacks, so it's at best acceptable.
Indeed, there's nothing wrong with, e.g., passkeys backed by KeePassXC. The problem is specifically that passkeys support attestation, so eventually no websites that you need to use will support passkeys from those pieces of software.
I like the writing in this article. The author did warn us, but the punchline takes a while to get to:
> I’d like to be clear that there are legitimate uses of remote attestation. By using a website that requires attested passkeys you can be sure you stay safe from accidentally installing a scammer’s fake passkey application that steals your data – the website will reject such a passkey. You might want an attested Passkey even if the website doesn’t require it, since you can use attestation to verify that your software has not been tampered with by a hacker while you weren’t looking.
> As for reasons to not want attestation: you might want to be able to use software that Twitter (formally X) doesn’t specifically approve of, such as Linux. Or a phone with a refurbished operating system.
So the bad timeline is the one in which the industry gradually transitions to "you can't log on unless everything about your system is exactly as we want." Figures.
Before anybody thinks "surely they can't ban all linux users", they don't need to.
The systemd folks are also working on a startup that is building verifiable computing into Linux via systemd. So, we have no choice on the matter anyway.
It could become of choice of approved distro vs non approved distro.
> So the bad timeline is the one in which the industry gradually transitions to
We have been on that timeline for every other tech transgression. There are no signs that this will be a different timeline.
They would have to start by banning Apple users. Apple does not support attestations from consumer devices. Apple has said multiple times they see it as a consumer privacy violation.
Remote attestation is the root of all evil and a severe threat to freedom. It's disturbing that those working on this technology are so willing to "put the nooses on their own necks."
I don’t know if it’s productive for me to talk about how a headline is off-putting, but I’m going to mention it because, well, it’s a headline, and a headline is a strong first impression.
Is the audience of this article the kind of people who are already using passkeys and like them? Because, if so, we’re starting at a deficit here. The author is out to get my beloved passkeys that have saved me so much time and pain.
Are passkeys perfect? No. Are they even very good for no-technical users? Absolutely not…they’re incredibly confusing for that kind of person if you ask me.
However, for my workflow, I’ll take them over a password+2FA type of situation where logging in is such an annoyance. The security part of the discussion is very interesting and a lot of the things in this article are stuff that I didn’t know before reading it.
The issue is that, putting on my user hat, I just don’t care. As long as my accounts are reasonably secure I’m much more concerned about ease of use and workflow.
You don't care, until you use the wrong apple pay card and apple nukes your account and you can no longer login to anywhere because all your keys are in your now remotely bricked iphone.
Substitute apple with google, pay card with youtube comment and iphone with android for the "open" experience.
tldr from memory: Guy used 2 legitimately purchased gift cards that had been tampered and their codes were used by someone else. His account was locked with no recurse.
I think he could still use his phone, but all the online stuff were locked down. He only managed to get it back after his case reached this website(hn) and senior Apple people stepped in.
The intended audience is people who are not yet using passkeys, or have just started (due to all the websites demanding them now) but don't really know what they are.
I apologize that the headline is provocative. I thought for a long time about how to appeal to both people who are barely aware of what passkeys are but also not put off people who like them. I considered calling them a "Trojan Horse" in the headline as I do in the body (i.e. legitimately lovely, but with a terrible and unobvious problem) but "trojan" has another connotation in computer security.
Nonetheless, I said what I meant. Convenience is how they get you. This convenience didn't have to come with a trap, but thanks to the way it was designed, it does.
Sure, I think your logic makes sense, and I don’t want to overemphasize complaints about headlines.
Regarding how I feel about passkeys after reading your article, logically I am reading what you wrote and conceptually understand the trap, it’s just hard to wrap my head around what kind of situation would cause this trap to “catch” me so to speak.
I.e., the upside is real and immediate, the downside is theoretical and tied to future uncertainty.
You're right, I didn't explain in much detail the motivation that will push websites to start requiring the remote attestation flag to be set. I will try to cover that in a future article.
But as for how it could "catch" you: if you use FOSS devices that are unattestable (as is the case for the LineageOS phone and Linux laptop I exclusively use), you may one day find you can't use many websites.
You know what’s a great way to get me to not read something? Shitting on it immediately and making it seem like the articles just going to be another pointless rant.
The title put me off completely.
I’m tired of people shitting on everything. Especially without offering any advice on how to improve things. It’s exhausting to read. And apparently it’s not even the point of the article. So why is it the title?
I really can't comprehend what the actual issue is here. The title isn't "shitting" on anything, it doesn't say "If you use passkeys, you are a horrible person". It literally is a summary of the article's point - Passkeys are a trap. It even offers a solution you long for - Do not use them, a perfectly fine recourse on an individual level unless you expect OP to overpower a massive tech alliance.
The tone hair-splitting makes it seem like you weren't going to be that receptive to the point anyway, no matter how many layers of subtext are inserted to abstract away the actual point, that being - Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.
>Especially without offering any advice on how to improve things.
>And apparently it’s not even the point of the article.
It wasn't a pointless rant, you're seemingly primed for something that didn't happen here.
It's a good argument that passkeys are a trap while TOTPs offer the security you need but avoid the absolute control passkeys may hand over, so stick with those.
TOTP/SMS 2FA is a gigantic pain, I've probably lost multiple 24 hour days worth of time added up from entering TOTP and SMS 2FA codes dozens of times per day on websites that mandate it despite having nothing meaningful worth securing.
With passkeys I click once and I'm in like the golden age of using the web with a password manager in 2012. It's a huge quality of life improvement. If people want to avoid passkeys for whatever reason, that's fine but not interested in reading the same slippery slope argument that gets reposted every week.
A recurring issue with these critiques is how they seemingly presuppose passkeys are an all or nothing thing, and losing your passkey means losing access entirely. Which isn't how it works basically anywhere. It's just another auth method, if you can't use a passkey you fall back to whatever recovery method is offered. If passkeys became some user hostile trap overnight I'd just unenroll them and use TOTP, SMS 2FA, email 2FA, or whatever else is supported.
And every critic always attacks this same thing. TOTP isn’t so bad, my password manager can do it. 2FA is fine it’s automatically pulled from my phone.
It’s still phishable. The password is still sent. You haven’t solved anything, you just piled more complexity on top to make it harder. People can still use the same password at 12 websites.
Passkeys never get transmitted. If you hack into a server and steal my credentials, all you get is a public key. You can’t use it at another website. A bad developer can store my password or TOTP secret in a way that makes it useful to a thief. That’s not possible with Passkeys.
No one ever offers an alternative other than saying it’s irrelevant. Despite practical experience showing otherwise.
Passkeys work and make my life better. These constant rants remind me of seeing people argue that the GUIs are a waste of time and no one will ever use them and it’s a fad that will go away and the only reason everyone’s talking about them is companies want to sell graphics cards and mice.
Passkeys work because you always have the hardware for them.
Suppose I had only passkeys and Google Pay. I take a train into town and lose my phone. What then? I'm screwed.
I couldn't just go home because I'd need to buy a ticket or taxi using my phone. I couldn't buy a replacement phone. I wouldn't be able to online shop on a library computer or withdraw money unless I have a physical bank branch. (I do not.) I can't even contact anyone unless I know their number and borrow a phone or find a way to send an email.
My preferred balance of risk vs convenience is: passwords in a password manager, hardware-based 2FA only for making account changes, and confirmation emails (My email password is not in my password vault.) any time a site successfully or unsuccessfully processes a login attempt.
There is no hardware element. If someone phishes my password, I'll know right away from the login email, unless they're so talented or lucky that they also accessed my email or found a way to spoof my 2FA. If I lose my phone, I'm not totally helpless. I don't see an overall downside to my strategy that isn't worse than passkeys.
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Edit: One suggested alternative I can fathom is "passkeys managed by password manager". While this does provide better security than "passwords managed in a password manager", my experience has been that passkeys are not well-implemented across all platforms where they Just Work(TM) on every site. I don't know how you'd go about using passkeys in a shared public computer setting (university lab or library) unless you can install browser extensions (and why would you want to, even if you could?). At the end of the day, these passkeys are still secured by the password manager's single master password. Regardless of what I use, I want emails when a login attempt succeeds or fails. It takes one full second to swipe away at my convenience, and I would instantly become alert to an attempt or login I didn't execute.
I've been complaining about passkeys for a long time and it was driving me crazy that it seemed to be the one thing that Big Tech, tech-savvy people, and normies were all on the same page about. The recent PR push a few months back was overwhelming.
Passkeys in theory are great, but the capabilities of the spec are worrying. Defaults can and do change, and when they do, so follows 99% of the population, and then you find yourself either getting blocked out of services because your hardware/software doesn't comply, or you give in.
But on the other end, it might not matter anyways. Apple, Google, Cloudflare, are already pushing similar garbage and now you increasingly have to scan a QR code that verifies your mobile hardware to use a desktop.
The main thing I think technical people forget is that just because a protocol calls for transferability being a required feature (not that it really is here), it really doesn't matter if implementing it isn't strictly necessary for the protocol to work. That's one of the reasons why we have a bajillion different OAuth and OIDC implementations that plug into existing account systems in various ways, from being the only way to log in to being an optional way of logging in to an account that can also have an e-mail and password set. Developers are busy, and often implement just what they need to plug in to the OIDC providers their PM wants, and nothing more.
Both Passkeys and OIDC are vendor lockin enablers due to these design choices.
I wish the next standards would keep this in mind.
Passkeys make it feel like the site is trying to get more info about me; it seems harder to maintain multiple accounts with passkeys. They feel worse for anonymity than a password where you know exactly what you're pasting into the site.
Although this isn't true because actually with a password you have to choose how to generate it and everyone chooses different ways.
Passkeys only give a random public key + some capability bits, whereas almost all password logins ask for your email or phone number, for the inevitable reset dance likely facilitated over antiquated email or SMS. Realistically the latter is much leakier.
My understanding is that TOTP and physical security keys both share very little information about you. Perhaps passkeys, being part of a standard that the FIDO Alliance keeps updating, may some day be expected to reveal considerably more information. And the limited number of remote-attestation-approved passkey managers might someday all start start volunteering such information regardless.
For starters, AAGUID already reveals the passkey provider. It can be spoofed without attestation, but good faith (debatable choice of phrase obviously) users already reveal more about themselves, a fair bit more depending on who you ask and how unusual the choice of passkey provider is.
"If you accidentally leak your TOTP in a photograph of your desk"
So many security articles just seem to be so far removed from the real world. Like, when is that ever going to happen? It's the same principle that forces people to reset their password every month. Sounds secure in principle but then everyone just writes it down.
The reality is that Passkeys are way more convenient for most people. Reducing barriers to adoption is the best thing we can do to improve security.
I haven't swapped to passkeys because every website seems to implement and use them in different/strange ways. There's still no standardization here. Also the notion of just wanting everything in my KeePass + have it all integrated is my goal, and right now, that's just not a thing.
The part unique to passkeys is that the ability to disallow use is already sitting dormant everywhere and literally just needs websites to flip a switch. The other things you mentioned would all take effort for websites to set up.
Given the weight and blessing governments in Europe and America are putting behind passkey roll outs despite the awkward provider lock in, I’m convinced the centralisation of credentials is one of the early steps to making western digital IDs happen and granting convenient access to your credentials for law enforcement. Happy for you to mark my words and call me out if it doesn’t happen.
Ideally, passkeys should be cattle, not pets. You should have more than one per account, saved to more than one password manager. Then it's fine if they're not copyable because you can get another.
Those are not passkeys then. The idea of passkeys is that they’re synchronizable, since having to manually manage multiple credentials per account is extremely tedious.
To avoid lockout, you want to have more than one key to open a door however you do it. At least, for accounts that are important to you. It might be that one is a passkey and one is something else, though.
I'm sorry, what? Who has more than one password manager (other than a personal/work split)? That's absurd and not something anyone I've heard of would put up with
I actually use both. Bitwarden with a strong password and auto-locking for anything that needs actual security, or can manage to keep a session logged in. Chrome's built-in password manager is nice for a few sites that are not really that important at all (a few forums and local activity groups), yet for some reason keep requiring password reentry all the time.
I was confused also, I use my Yubikey a passkey, so I did not get the rant.
Yubikeys can be used as a device-bound passkey, that the FIDO2 thing.
Now software managed passkeys are also a thing and can be stored in a (good?) old password manager, of course this is less secure and could be disallowed in the future.
Thus the rant is about people without dedicated hardware keys that would have to use things like device-bound passkeys their OS instead of their password manager.
I learned lots of things about how messed up Passkeys are and there's a well known advocate online for them who keeps going on about how you can export them without ever mentioning that it's also possible for you not to be able to import them.
That's the kind of half assed communication that loses trust.
passkeys are a website telling you they don't trust you to manage your own password, and they would rather talk to your password manager directly and skip the meatbag in the middle.
and the websites are usually justified in saying that.
Yes, but also: passkeys are a website to prevent you from sharing your password with friends (like the Neflix example in the article). It's just a new form of corporate controlling.
But also, right now giving a website a passkey basically means being technically savvy or using a sensible system like the browser/OS. TOTP used to be this way, but then people got annoyed at the process and put everything into 3rd party apps that synced across devices. The same will happen with passkeys, at which point "passkeys are a website..." will morph into "attested passkeys are a website..." and the rest will remain true.
I'm in small tech saas and users having their accounts breached because they share a password with 100 other services is a constant. I have had to set forced 2FA on many products because we take the blame when the user has their account compromised.
Passkeys offer the same and more security but are less of a pain for the user.
If you also support TOTP and physical security keys as an alternative to passkeys, that should be enough to provide a stable long-term alternative for users of FOSS devices. And of course, RP-side you can choose to never require the remote attestation flag to be set.
Convenience is precisely the thing that big tech established tech platforms want to reward their users with to keep them around. The undeniable convenience of passkeys didn't have to come with a standard that is threatening against unattestable devices like my Linux phone. But it does, and that means passkeys are a way that the industry can discourage people away from using non-Google/Apple/Microsoft-approved devices.
Supporting physical security keys and passkeys is basically the same thing. It's the same APIs and standard (Webauthn). Most of the nonsense like attestation is partly left over from physical security keys but unnecessary and finally optional for passkeys. That's the irony of all this: passkeys were the attempt at "weakening" physical security key requirements for general use consumer things. They stay around for enterprises that still desire requiring specific physical keys. The complicated standards for the huge variety in key types and the relying party having any metadata on which key type was used is a relic of decades of backwards compatibility with physical security keys. Passkeys come with a standard that threatens against unattestable devices because it was built on a standard for attestable physical security keys. Not as much the other way around.
(Apple didn't join the FIDO Alliance on Passkeys until they made sure attestation was an optional feature and no longer a requirement, for consumer privacy reasons.)
Passkeys work on every Linux device I've used. Maybe the BSDs are missing support but there aren't any FOSS issues here.
This panic about "but what if attestation" goes for any standard that people on open source platforms use. What if browsers add attestation? You're only one update away from losing your freedom! Browsers are a conspiracy by big tech! Apple already built remote attestation into Safari under the Private Access Token system, after all.
There is no intent to kill FOSS, not even from Microsoft anymore. The reality is much worse: nobody really cares about FOSS, except for the parts that make money. No big tech CEO is wringing their hands thinking of ways to end freedom once and for all. They just don't care if whatever they do doesn't work on Linux.
Companies like Disney are happy to block any Linux computer already with the standards we have. Not because they hate freedom, but because they don't care their DRM doesn't work.
Attested passkeys, on the other hand, are a massive pain. You'd need to get a list of all the keys for all the normal trusted parties (Google/Microsoft, Apple doesn't even support it, Yubikey, and so on) and keep that list up to date. The moment a model of Yubikey gets a firmware bug published, all keys signed by all Yubikeys of that firmware need to be retracted (and all users locked out) or attestation is meaningless. They're way too much work outside of the space they're actually useful: managed hardware for employees, where the user has already given up any control anyway.
TOTP is not an alternative for passkeys. It's trivial to phish and it does get phished all the time. The only comparable authentication mechanism is client certificates/mTLS, which has been tried and dismissed long ago.
Once all the big players started rapidly adopting it, it felt like it wasn't a standard working in my interests. I've been dodging all these annoying "don't you wanna create a passkey" interruptions during sign-ins every time.
Never really cared enough to actually look deep into it to this was a good read. Appreciated.
This is an excellently written article & an excellent bookmark to keep saved & reshare in future discussions around authentication. It comprehensively summarises a lot of thoughts I had had myself about Passkeys, much more eloquently than I could have.
I am a big Passkey advocate, but like many things these days - as pointed out here - they are a double-edged sword that have been very effectively "poisoned" by the same groups responsible for much of the recent DRM-ification of a lot of web tech.
A close parallel of this is the EU's efforts to build "digitally sovereign" software but ending up increasing reliance on Apple & Google in the process[0].
The attestion part only serves to strengthen to Google/Apple duopoly and it should be removed from the standard entirely.
There's also the fact that passkey storage is currently shit. Even the most expensive yubikeys can only store 100 passkeys. I currently have 700+ entries in my password store, and that's excluding the business stuff. Am I supposed to faf about with 8 yubikeys? Somehow labelling them so I know which 100 passkeys each one contains?
> The attestion part only serves to strengthen to Google/Apple duopoly
That's strange, since neither of them are a big player in the attestation enabled key manufacturer market. AFAIK Apple doesn't even make keys, and barely anyone uses Google's keys. You even mention Yubikey, yet somehow think Google and Apple have a duopoly here.
The equivalent of 'owner override' is user access to all secrets.
As with TC, one could have all the user-protecting aspects without any of the user-limiting aspects, by implementing suitable owner override / by enabling users to know all secrets.
Of course they are, if Apple loves a standard then it contributes in some way to platform lock-in. Safari is configured to automatically upgrade user passwords to passkeys (no user intervention is required with the out-of-box configuration of macOS) as long as the target website adopts the necessary APIs. And just like that, you're in.
Attested passkeys are a dream for Apple. While google is sliding down this slippery slope fastest (eg MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY to require security updates) Apple has the most to gain commercially, they must be salivating over the prospect of accelerating device replacement (and blocking Linux/android forks) driven by banks, streaming media and governments.
Well they built it, verified everything was in place, presumably got some tick from govt/banks/etc then removed it. I’d love to know what happened/what they are thinking. And what happens next and when.
Do you think they did that to keep us FOSS neckbeard hackers happy?
Apple also built remote attestation into their browser, I don't think they care much about FOSS neckbeard hackers. They probably see the same privacy and security risks and didn't see a reason to go along with the rest.
Apple is perfectly fine with taking control of your privacy if they're the ones in control, and in this case they would have to put third parties in control instead. I'm sure they'd much rather take control themselves and build these types of checks into their "Sign in with Apple ID" buttons instead, so they can put "if you want Human Proven Secure Attested devices (invented by Apple), let your users sign in with Apple ID" on their website.
> Indeed, just now I generated a passkey using free and open source software, and then I emailed it to a friend, and now we can both access the same website using that passkey. At no point did I have to ask anyone for permission, not the website, not the FIDO Alliance; not even my friend, who kindly let me monopolize her time without objection. What’s more, I don’t have to type any numbers by hand to use a passkey; I don’t have to remember any magic words; passkeys just work.
This (before they go on to describe actual passkeys) sounds like object capabilities to me. Capabilities combine designation and authorization so if you don't have it, you can't use it. It's the type of security that we should be moving to.
Passkey attestation sounds like a nightmare for user privacy and for anyone that doesn't use a major corporate operating system.
I'm not sure how common this is as I don't voluntarily use passkeys, but some platforms have a device manufacturer whitelist. OpenAI for example forces the use of hardware passkeys in some cases and seemingly determines this based on whatever name the device reports.
I'm not looking forward to when passkeys become even more forced upon us and you have to carry around multiple devices by different manufacturers because platform A and B don't support the same devices.
If you don't like passkeys the solution is very simple. Resist using them. As long as a significant minority resist and refuse, they will have to keep other types of auth around.
Has to be a significant majority or else they'll just turn the other methods off.
I don't have the choice to use a bank card online without 2FA - it's mandated. I can either use one of the options provided or I will go to my bank in person and close my account. Those are the possibilities. Nothing else.
An uncompromising minority has surprising power. See Nassim Taleb's idea of assymetric minority rule.
Passkeys are only one kind of 2FA.
Yes, banks are particularly bad at this because their threat model is strong.
My bank required installing an authenticator, but apparently recently they've allowed SMS based 2FA. It seems users complained/resisted and they had to accommodate them. Maybe you should give feedback to your bank. Be the uncompromising minority.
I think 2FA is fine and a good idea, but I agree with the author that passkeys seem fraught as designed.
As somebody that’s had to deal with US banks and their bizarre “authentication” schemes: I wish.
Many would actually rather you close their account with them than them making the tiniest compromise or offering any alternative to their SOP at all. That SOP strongly assumes things like “all customers have a mobile phone plan with the big three carriers”, “all customers own property or at least have car insurance” (that’s already their authentication fallback flow!) etc.
> Intended audience: non-technical citizens of the web
A good description of the design principles behind passkeys, actually.
> They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.
Nope, that's attestation in general; passkeys are not required for that. Passkeys have nothing to do with secure boot, for example. Which version of manifest and adblock chrome/edge supports also has nothing to do with their passkey support. Nor does the possible mandatory age-verification flag we might soon get built into our phones: it'll definitely use some kind of crypto but that can still be one in other ways than with passkeys.
Passkeys are a kludge for many reasons, but let's be careful with our terminology.
>> They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.
The expression was wrong, but the real meaning was described further in the post. The author meant that sites with passkeys can render unapproved software useless, in contrast to TOTP where any client is compatible.
Because the various cloud providers want to lock you into their own proprietary ecosystem, of course. How else could they in the future force you to pay a subscription to be allowed to log in to any website?
Backwards compatibility. Webauthn is the same standard that has been used for physical security keys for decades. Passkeys are a simplification UX layer on top of decades of hardware support and a complex ecosystem of key providers and key types.
Admittedly, my experience comes from OAuth and Webauthn. I have yet to try to implement passkeys. My exposer to passkeys comes completely from long blog posts complaining about it.
A passkey is webauthn you can use on another device, if you choose to store the key in a place that can be shared. Passkeys also include a protocol where you can log in over BLE from (for instance) your phone to your computer if you store your keys on a different device than the one you're logging into.
If you use webauthn, you're already using passkeys.
Passkeys is just a new brand name and UX flow on top of Webauthn. If you've handled Webauthn keys before you have already seen the code to "implement" passkeys.
Because you or someone needs to publish "<digital_signature>" in a way that cannot be forged, stolen, MiTM'd, or otherwise compromised. Basically the key generating that signature just becomes another password, far more difficult to use in practice, and sharing all the same disadvantages.
So no one implements it for site-local login. Even the biggest sites like Amazon, for example, still use old-school passwords+2FA.
The way secure auth works for small sites is that a third party[1] authenticates you, who the website trusts more than mere users. And that's where all the complexity comes up. You need something secure stored on your known-secure device, a password alone won't do.
[1] In practice Google or Meta. Occasionally Apple or Microsoft. Everyone else is noise.
I guess I am envisioning the user agent doing all of this. You go to a site and create click account, your browser shows a pop-up: "<website> is asking you create an EasyAuth account. Would you like to create an account on this site?" If you click yes, then the user agent does this in the background:
website: Sure you can have an account. Use this token <token> once and this ID <user_id> forever.
me: Ok, here's your token <token> for ID <user_id> and my public key is <public_key>. Signed, <digital_signature> to prove it works on my end.
Maybe generating a unique public key for each website is not substantially better than generating a password, but at least a signature cannot get stolen on the server side or in transit. You wouldn't have to change your public key if their database got slurped.
Passwords also aren't standardized, so they are pain to generate (special characters required or disallowed?). They don't reliably autofill into a website. You still have to go through a manual flow to login; user-agent doesn't just keep you logged in. I guess I would be fine if the user-agent knew how to authenticate me to every website.
Maybe this is what the passkey system was before it got designed-by-committee'd into oblivion. I am just always amazed by how complex authentication is when the user-agent should be able to handle this rather painlessly.
> I guess I am envisioning the user agent doing all of this.
That's literally what a passkey is, that the linked article argues against. It relies on the platform vendor of your device hardware to validate the full stack of software. You can't just do it in a browser because anything that reads the browsers data (or attaches a debugger, or runs the browser in an instrumented VM, etc...) can exfiltrate the key.
Microsoft logins are automatically taking us through "creating passkey" and "failed to create a passkey" without any prompt to user or consent from user
I skimmed the article, lots of info. I use multiple Yubikeys with passkeys and feel better about the auth experience than any other solution thus far. When I have a negative experience I'll reexamine my usage.
That's why the article calls it a "trap". Like any trap, you have positive experiences until it's too late to leave. In this case, adoption of passkeys reaches a threshold where they all start requiring attestation, and now your fallback option is unsupported.
The objection is not against using keys for authentication, it's against the standard including attestation provisions, because there is an incredibly large space for abusing these to limit user freedom.
BigTech doesn't need attestations in the passkey spec to limit freedom.
Attestations were added so that highly specific domains where attestation is required (by law, a regulator etc.) can still use the same passkey spec as everyone else without having to invent their own thing.
If there was benefit to BigTech of locking in Auth to a specific device, they'd have done it long ago - it's not difficult.
Where is it required? If the answer is "nowhere before, but now that passkeys support it, places are starting to", then that's an argument that it's bad, not that it's good. And being able to "use the same passkey spec as everyone else without having to invent their own thing" is bad. I want them to all have to invent their own, so that most of them will make mistakes that let the attestation be bypassed and freedom be restored.
Lots of places where you might have specific requirements about your authenticating users. E.g. to achieve FIPS compliance, or if your user population is low-single-digits because it's critical national infrastructure.
> I want them to all have to invent their own, so that most of them will make mistakes that let the attestation be bypassed and freedom be restored.
I most definitely do not want operators of CNI to be "inventing their own" that can trivially allow compromise or weakness. "User freedom" is not the prevailing value in a lot of authentication contexts.
sure, and some planes still crash, but that's still not reason why I will stop flying (using TOTP), it's about odds, I've never heard about TOTP MITM attack in few EU countries I read news from daily, it's unheard thing, only heard about it in US with crap identity verification
Passkey, as currently implemented, is not something I wish to use.
I have sign up a few for "get a feel" of what is going on.
but the implementation outside a few flagship website just sucks. It is infested with the "design by committee" disease -- too many options, almost impossible to implement correctly.
Eh, it’s alright. The spec is quite overengineered, but practically it’s very possible to achieve a good user experience.
And conversely, there are also many ways to make legacy password based auth break password managers and annoy users even though there’s no specification for that at all.
The precedents for a site operator allowing only “approved” software are many. Passkeys doesn’t prevent that, and indeed offers a new way to implement it. The author argues that this is a trap.
You can put your passkeys in a file if you like. I do for my personal agent. It's logged in on a few sites and it uses passkeys. Saves a few steps when it's using the browser to navigate them because it doesn't need to input credentials except for the first time.
As the article says, there are but it's still rare. But the capability exists, it's in the spec. And you know how this goes - now that this is possible, they just need to onboard enough users and then start progressively shoving it down the throats of the rest. What are you gonna do, not use major internet services?
They'd currently also have to give up on Apple users. Apple has made a strong case that they will not support attestation on consumer devices because they see it as a consumer privacy violation. (They support it on enterprise-managed devices only.)
This is ignorant fearmongering. Attestation has existed for decades, for enterprise use cases. Now decades later, people discovering attestation for the first time are panicking. If you had panicked a decade ago, that reaction might have had more merit.
The way passkeys have been implemented is an absolute travesty. If it were one passkey per device, and 2-factor was still being enforced, I'd support them. But
But, instead, we end up with 1 passkey per device (potentially per web browser) per website -- and some websites do not allow any other kind of auth. If you lose that phone, or wipe it, move on, or it is compromised, now you can't login to your account anymore?
There is literally no reason for all of this nonsense.
Websites should be providing a challenge, your device should produce a tweaked key based on the domain, sign the challenge, and that should be it. You have one root key per device.
A standard API to register new passkeys for new devices.
Require two factors Password + passkey, or two passkeys.
No transferring private keys between devices.
Requiring 2 factors per website per user, potentially per device, is far more complexity than most people are capable of dealing with.
And I really do not like that my phone# and email# are now de-facto second factors on everything.
I understand the shortcomings of pass keys but I feel the tone of the article is a bit tin foil hat.
Especially this line: "I believe this was done in order to deliberately confuse users and encourage them not to look too closely at the fine text."
Don't attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to incompetence
A lot of people have said there are pros and cons to any authentication method. Pass keys have drawbacks but they also for a lot of advantages.
TOTP has a fatal flaw: it relies on the human to not paste the number into a phishing website. You can do a lot of bank transfers or whatever, in seconds, with a valid session derived from a phished TOTP.
Characterizing it as a sticky note on the desk is extremely dishonest.
>>> Two-Factor Authentication (in particular: receiving a text message or email with a one-time code), and later came the more robust system of Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) – in common parlance, “authenticator apps.”
I stopped reading after that. Obviously this guy doesn’t know what he is talking about or why that sms and otp are just worthless more or less if you care about security. They are actually loopholes in security. If you can use passkeys you would want to make sure that your stupid service provider(I.e Google, bank etc) is not being stupid to fallback to otp or sms crap.
First of all, what’s wrong with the author, if you have to read through 14 paragraphs to finally reach the point where they actually write on the topic directly.
Second, I think the article is really silly. If they are concerned that eventually service providers might restrict passkey authentication to authorized passkey providers, what prevents them from disabling password/TOTP authentication? That’s just silly. I’ll use passkeys while they are convenient. If service providers start disallowing my passkey provider, I’ll either switch to password/TOTP if that’s possible or just stop using the service whatsoever. What’s the big deal?
If they will be popular, and made inconvenient, you could be forced to use them. Like 2FA in corporate environments; it's forced and you can't do anything else than to put a code every time you login somewhere.
I will never use passkeys, under any circumstances. My 25 year old GMAIL account could require one and I guess I’d just forward the emails and not log in again.
Hard disagree. Phishing is a major problem. Passwords+OTP are phishable[1]--passkeys are not (the signature is bound to the domain and cannot be forwarded). That alone makes passkeys worthwhile for the vast vast majority of consumers. This is not a theoretical threat model. You simply cannot realistically expect even a savvy consumer to be able to save themselves from phishing all the time. One mistake and they are fucked.
If you write a long article about the merit of passkeys and there is no occurrence of the string "phish" in your article, I am afraid I cannot take your rant seriously.
Again, this stuff is not merely theoretical. YubiKeys have been a thing at Google and other major tech companies for almost two decades now and the effects are well-studied.
[1]: I have found for some weird reason, this is often overlooked and misunderstood in the industry. People even know about SIM swaps and stuff like that, but don't realize OTP is not phishing-proof.
Phishing is a major problem, but it happens less than you think. Password managers are also checking the domain before supplying a saved password. A user who relies on autofilling the password every time will notice when their password manager suddenly does not autofill.
Yubikeys are a great second factor honestly. But do you want to use a Yubikey as a passkey? Sorry you are likely dissatisfied. Many websites and apps (especially apps) support passkeys but would prohibit using your Yubikey as a passkey.
> Phishing is a major problem, but it happens less than you think.
Bullshit. Literally number one attack vector.
> Password managers are also checking the domain before supplying a saved password.
Password managers are not anywhere as ubiquitously used as you'd think. Even if you rely on password managers, you encounter scenarios where the website relies on a different domain that's not paired appropriately. Some "legitimate" mofos like Plaid used to ask password for third party website. Consumers don't see a password manager failure to fill out a password as a security issue. They see it as a routine password manager failure.
That’s an out-of-date view. The number one attack vector these days is cookie stealing. The prevalence of 2FA even weak ones like SMS-based 2FA has made plain old phishing so much less effective.
That's not correct - more than 1/3 of initial access is by phishing at present, according to Cisco Talos (and others major security publications largely agree with this). Ref: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/ir-trends-q1-2026/
What you may be confusing with is the number of incidents involving token theft, which is often facilitated by phishing.
That publication is talking about phishing as a threat to workers inside corporations and government agencies and public administrations. It’s not a thing for regular consumers. Passkeys aren’t usually used in corporate environments with an IT department anyways.
YubiKeys have been a thing at Google and other major tech companies for almost two decades now and the effects are well-studied.
My experience is that yubikeys have a tendency to get lost, get cleared, get mixed up (which of my 4 identical yubikeys has the right passkey?), stop working reliably from random USB issues, etc. And worse, yubikeys are awful to use. Like am I seriously supposed to take off my phone case every time I want to plug in a yubikey to the USB-C port (which may or may not be working depending on whether moisture has condensed in the port) so I can use the one mobile browser that supports them to retrieve a passkey every time I want to log in?
No, fuck that. Just let me use an SSH cert at that point. The existence of phishing is a comparatively minor evil.
Sharing and phishing are on two different axes. You can have shareable credentials that are phishing-resistant when used.
You can have hardware-backed SSH keys that are not cloneable. You would need the browser to prevent phishing while still using SSH agent as its underlying signature mechanism (implied by my "in a consumer package").
Right, which is why Passkeys are consumer-minded enhancement to SSH keys in that browsers are asked to require that every domain gets a different passkey. I've seen SSH agents with that requirement, but yes very few users of SSH use more than one public key per device at a time, and many even use the same private key across multiple devices rather than enroll multiple SSH public keys.
Password managers drive me furious. I hate them. They don't work and I don't trust them. I've lost count of the number of times I thought to myself "Thank god I didn't trust the password manager and memorized the password." Many times, the password manager doesn't work properly with a particular website or scenario or I need to remember the password for a different form (not web browser-based).
You probably don't use a lot of different software like I do. For example my work computer is encrypted at boot in the BIOS and I need a password for that... There is no password manager available during BIOS boot up to fill in the password for me. Or I need to run a legacy application in a less popular browser or in the terminal/CLI where the password manager is not available and I don't want to open my vault and manually copy my plaintext password in front of my colleague who I'm currently screen-sharing with. I've had times when I was temporarily locked out of the password manager or I my laptop was wiped clean after a mandatory laptop swap/upgrade at my company (my work is confidential so there are a lot of security protocols I need to follow).
Once, I lost the master password of my password manager and the email to reset that master password was sent to my email inbox which required a password which was stored in my password manager which I was trying to regain access to... Catch 22... In the end, I got lucky that I didn't trust the entire security model and I had written down the password for my email on a sticky note on my desk!
The reason I lost the master password is because my company made me change the password every few months and didn't let me reuse old passwords and forced me to use a specific sequence of special characters. Eventually I couldn't remember which of the last 10 passwords I used was the latest one and which special characters were not allowed for which environment.
Passkeys are a pretty terrible UX on their own, in that you have no control over managing them . And every site has a custom experience.
Epic for example has at least 3 different ways to load the pass key e.g. username first, passkey first, username + password, then passkey. Luckily their app lets you in with Passkeys alone
Walmart prompts for username first, then passkey, then it sends you a verification code to your email address.
The issue is that every site has a random flow of username, password, oauth (then a few oauth screens), passkey, 2fa and so on.
Authentication has become absurd. None of this is making people safer. If sites are seeing less fraud reports, it's likely they are harder to detect rather than less frequent.
The author gently notes what my current Passkey problem is. I don't know what "passkey" really is, because there is a huge array of "things" that "can be passkeys".
I still really like fido U2F. They are (relatively) obvious; they are (relatively) open - there are many third parties that support it; they can be done shareable (I know Trezor - which is mainly a crypto wallet - can be used as U2F with the same "seed" that you can share); it's much more simple to grasp. They also solve the phishing issue effectively.
There are some truths in there (attestation exists, passkeys are complicated), but in general, the article strikes me as bad faith.
Various dimensions (copyable vs non-copyable, transferable vs. non-transferable, hardware bound vs. software only, attestation vs. non-attestation) are presented as if they all exist as distinct specification or implementation properties, yet at least half of these don't, at a first glance.
"User-Present vs Non-User-Present passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": Nope, all WebAuthN credentials require user presence verification:
> requireUserPresence
> The constant Boolean value true. It is included here as a pseudo-parameter to simplify applying this abstract authenticator model to implementations that may wish to make a test of user presence optional although WebAuthn does not.
"Transferable vs Non-Transferable passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": There's no such property in WebAuthN or FIDO. Passkey implementations may or may not implement the optional password manager migration flow, but the website has nothing to do with that.
"Hardware-Backed vs Software-Backed passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": Also no, or rather, this point is redundant with "Attested vs Non-Attested passkeys": A non-attested passkey can tell you what it wants about being hardware backed, so they're effectively the same property. The same applies to "Copyable vs Non-Copyable passkeys [...] Both kinds exist."
So let's unpack this statement:
"This means Twitter (formally X) can say to you, “sorry, we only accept the User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed varieties of passkey here."
User-present: redundant, as all passkeys are.
User-verified: This part is true. Sites can choose to demand this, make it optional, or discourage it. Quite reasonable, given that the optimal value probably depends on whether there's also a password being entered, i.e. whether the passkey is supposed to be a single factor (possession of/access to some device) or two factors (being able to authenticate to that device biometrically or using a knowledge factor, usually).
Non-copyable/hardware-backed: Realistically, a site won't be able to make you use attestation, as that would mean excluding the by far most popular implementations in the wild, i.e. Android and iOS's native solutions. By extension, they can't enforce anything about copyability either (or to be precise, nothing they can't already with user agent sniffing and device fingerprinting).
So what's left? Websites can effectively decide whether to require/use passkeys for two factor or single factor authentication. Doesn't sound as scary to me anymore.
All in all, the article makes a few valid points, but arrives at them via heavy handwaving and a lot of motivated reasoning to back it up. This article could have been 70% shorter and would have probably made a stronger or at least equally strong and more accurate point. Generally, I really do agree that there are many possibilities for user-hostile traps in WebAuthN, but if we want to successfully navigate them, critics need to step up their epistemology. The specs are really byzantine and confusing enough.
There’s so much FUD out there about Passkeys. They are barely any different from the keys you use to push to GitHub. It’s all going to be okay.
Yes, they have some window dressing and opt-in features that extend the basic concept of asymmetric key pairs. Attestation is only in the spec to appease some large enterprise users for very specific scenarios. Signature counters are in there too, but since Apple decided not to implement (which I’m fine with), they are essentially irrelevant in the general case.
In practice, Passkeys are really quite simple.
We can do this, people. We can move beyond the era where poorly protected password databases are handed around like candy.
> receiving a text message or email with a one-time code
This is less secure than pure username+password in principle because it gives an impression of greater security while actually delivering the important secret in plaintext. This can cause platforms to enable the higher trust features, or have additional confidence that someone is not an attacker, even when either one would be highly inappropriate.
TOTP does not have this problem since the secret is enrolled once by the account owner and then never communicated again, especially never helpfully to an attacker right when they need it.
> One use case is particularly intriguing to me. In principle, remote attestation can also be run in reverse, to verify that the server you connect to is not doing anything you don’t want it to be doing (such as stealing your credit card number, or keeping backups of the posts you delete). Sadly, to my knowledge, no major platform has ever implemented “reverse” remote attestation this way.
This is only possible if you've audited the code in order to approve it. In practice, this requires auditing the entire SBOM, manually, yourself, for every single platform release. Or deferring to someone else to do it. I expect this will never happen.
> What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys.
Use proper password managers, like keepassxc. Then you have control. But problem is that not all sites support that. If you can't use the above - then yes, passkeys are bad, especially if they become mandatory.
If you keep reading the article, you’ll see that the claim is current (unattested) passkeys are a stepping stone to “attested passkeys”. Attested passkeys would require remote attestation with OS, TPM, and password manager all working together, and would allow websites to require things like hardware backed non transferable passkeys that you don’t control. This has always been my suspicion and I do think it’s worth worrying about.
Sure, if they are actively pushing for that, it's bad. But otherwise passkeys are OK. It's a neat way to use private / public key pair instead of a dummy password.
This is already in the spec. It's not some faraway hypothetical, they could start requiring this tomorrow if they wanted to. And if you're capable of seeing any trends wrt the 'attestation' and 'securing' everything that are already here, you will know that all they're waiting for is for a significant enough portion of users to get passkeys on their platforms naturally, and then just force everyone else.
> What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys
Passkeys are _by_ _design_ representable as clear-text strings. You can export them and sync between devices. I'm using BitWarden with a self-hosted Vaultwarden for the server-side to do that, for example.
> When a user creates a passkey on any of their devices, it gets synced to all the user’s other devices using the same passkey provider that is also signed into the same user’s account. Thus, passkeys created on one device become available on all devices.
> Notably, if the user gets a new device and sets it up with their passkey provider, the user’s passkeys are synced and available for sign-in on the new device.
The resident keys (the ones created by platform-specific TPMs) are not passkeys. And they had been standardized _before_ the passkeys.
This does not follow from my understanding of the word, and the words 'export' and 'exportable' don't appear on the page you've linked. Nor did I see anything indicating that was a core part of their design from a cursory reading of the page, although I might have missed something. Your quote certainly doesn't imply 'exportable'.
Syncable? Yes. Exportable? Yes. Clear text? Sure, behind the scenes. Exportable as clear text? Yes, but not intended. To quote Tim Cappalli, who's credited on the W3C spec as an editor[1] and maintains passkeys.dev,[2] so presumably knows what he's talking about: "Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text."[3]
> This does not follow from my understanding of the word, and the words 'export' and 'exportable' don't appear on the page you've linked.
I literally provided a citation.
> Syncable? Yes. Exportable? Yes. Clear text? Sure, behind the scenes. Exportable as clear text? Yes, but not intended.
A syncable credential is by necessity representable in clear text at some point. In comparison, resident WebAuthn private keys NEVER leave the secure device.
WebAuthn is a _superset_ of Passkeys. Here's the citation from your own linked page:
> This use case illustrates how a consumer-centric Relying Party can leverage the authenticator built-in to a user’s devices to provide phishing-resistant sign in using multi-device credentials (commonly referred to as synced passkeys).
...
> A backup eligible public key credential source is referred to as a multi-device credential whereas one that is not backup eligible is referred to as a single-device credential. See also § 6.1.3 Credential Backup State.
> A syncable credential is by necessity representable in clear text at some point.
I never said this was wrong.
> WebAuthn is a _superset_ of Passkeys
I don't see how your quote illustrates this, and I've only heard them referred to as the same thing. Would you care to elaborate? And maybe provide an example?
> multi-device credentials (commonly referred to as synced passkeys).
> A backup eligible public key credential source is referred to as a multi-device credential whereas one that is not backup eligible is referred to as a single-device credential.
The previous name for single-device credentials was "resident keys".
So yes, providing a way to export and back up the Passkeys was _literally_ the intention of the WebAuthn authors from the beginning. The ability to export and sync passkeys was not a temporary accident, it has always been intended functionality.
Curious if the author can provide examples of things we ever had ultimate control over?
None of us had a say in our existence itself. Skin color. If we cannot have a say over our provenance itself "ultimate control" is just an empty phrase.
Their concerns about big corp might hold some meager merit but "beware the avarice of rich people who view you as a sheep in their flock whether you want it or not" isn't really new.
This is ridiculous. You can nullify basically any argument by bringing up abstract philosophy that has very little to do with the issue at hand. "I want the ability to choose between A and B" - oh, but can you choose? Are you saying you have free will? What's to say the choice wouldn't be the same every time? And so on.
The point is very simple - there was once a day when we had considerably more control over the way we use computers and the networks that connect them. That is slowly being taken away, piece by piece, until the only path to use them is to 'consent' to whatever demands the corporations put up. Not that this doesn't exist already, but today will seem like the wild west in comparison to what's coming.
"Big tech is coercive and evil" isn't a new view, but "passkeys are one of their tools and not just some agnostic technology-first nerd solution" is still not widely known.
Yes you get me though my argument is the inverse; possible to assert any claim with abstract philosophy like "ultimate control"
And our agreement doesn't stop there. No views I encounter anymore at my near ripe old age of 50 are new anymore
Social conservatism whittles viable value statements down to a finite subset of cause-effect. And I don't mean just flag waving holy book social conservatism. This community is clinging hard to social tropes the other 8 billion are moving on from
Run a trend analysis on the comments of HN going back decades whole lot of repetitive gab about state management in a machine; chef or bash or llms... same old ground truth; don't speak too far outside the experience of readers or the inherent short term prediction engine in their brain will segfault from a biological memory overflow
Religious people are not the only ones who live in rhetorical fantasy
End of day the provenance of any socialized idea is some rando I have no obligation to march in lockstep with; physically or philosophically
The LLM should have suggested where you find the browser setting to disable it - they all have one. Can you explain why you're leaving the setting enabled, and using a user-script to disable it instead? Most browsers even offer per-site permissions.
Have all your mails at Google, ship stuff home with Amazon, but your authentication mechanism is a trap and anti-privacy?
My company's product uses passkeys-only and it works great. We don't need to store user's email addresses if they don't want to. Because we don't need a password-reset flow. Because passkeys usually sync and backup. And if you really want, you can have multiple passkeys for your account (or multiple accounts).
I don't see how we could use passkeys as a trap. Our users find it convenient and the security properties speak for themselves.
And when they don't? What then?
One of the biggest issues with the implementation of passkeys that I've encountered is that I'm not offered the choice of where a passkey will be stored. It's just a fight between my password manager, my browser and my OS which all try to be "first" to intercept the passkey request, and if the "wrong one" gets it there's no way to say "actually no, I didn't want you to handle this passkey request".
Therefore, the author's scenario that sites will wait until most of their users are using attested passkeys and then "flip the switch and start rejecting non-attested passkeys" isn't very plausible.
Attestation is certainly a stain on the WebAuthn spec, and it would have been better if Chrome and Firefox didn't support attestation (unless perhaps the browser is enrolled in enterprise management), but this blog post is presenting a hypothetical and unlikely scenario. That's not a good enough reason to recommend TOTP instead, given that TOTP is vulnerable to phishing and passkeys aren't.
If consumer-facing sites start requesting attestation when registering passkeys, they deserve to be vigorously called out, and maybe then the recommendation to use passkeys should be revisited. But until that happens, don't tell people not to use passkeys.
Of course it is, the site will reject the passkey and require you to create one that is attested.
> Are Netflix and Twitter currently requesting attestation when people register passkeys, and rejecting the registration if the user declines the permission prompt?
They could start tomorrow.
> a hypothetical and unlikely scenario.
You have not been paying attention, that scenario is where this whole thing is building towards.
> If consumer-facing sites start requesting attestation when registering passkeys, they deserve to be vigorously called out
It's going to be the banks first.
Why called out, it's all for your safety, to make sure you are not using an insecure client that might leak your data.
In Japan, this is already the reality. The FSA required brokerages to implement passkey authentication, and the effect is that it's no longer possible to have a brokerage account without a passkey. (Some brokerages, like Nomura Securities, will offer two separate client portals. The portal with money and trading-related functionality requires a passkey).
The thing that sucks a lot is that brokerages seem to also restrict the allowed software/hardware. Don't know the details, but none of my FIDO2 hardware keys were able to be used. I consistently use these hardware keys through WebAuthn, so I was surprised when my brokerage explicitly told me my hardware key is unsupported and I must use either Windows Hello or the iOS Passwords app.
The FSA's official explanation for mandating passkey implementation is that people kept falling for phishing attacks, and the attacks were getting too sophisticated thanks to "AI" or something.
Ah, yet another case of people being forced to use technology instead of being left alone doing things the old way where they understood all the risks.
Of course not, you still have some control over those FIDO2 hardware keys and they don't lock you to a limited set of devices. That's what the attestation is for, to allow banning the use of sign-in with anything but a couple megacorp providers. The few small time hangers on will be expelled in time. They're useful idiots for the adoption phase.
Notice that after lots of complaining about there being no way to transfer keys in the spec they developed some planned working group that will in the end only allow transferring from Google/Microsoft/Apple and maybe a few other dumpster companies. They aren't going to give that control up.
They could also start requiring you to mail a DNA sample to create an account tomorrow.
> It's going to be the banks first.
The same banks that (in the US) largely don’t even systematically use 2FA for online banking logins and completely ignore 3DS for card payments? Attestation usually requires customers to buy and carry extra hardware, so I highly doubt it.
The only place I’ve seen mandatory attestation is in enterprise IT, where admins can supply and enforce usage of e.g. Yubikeys.
Fuck banks with a cactus for forcing us to relinquish our freedoms as a precondition of interacting with them, which is a precondition to exist in most societies.
Arguably, even passkeys with attestation would be a step forward compared to that, as banks could require an external authenticator tap on a rooted device, or signature of some sandboxed secure element that runs independently from the application OS.
It’s dead so far. Again, X.com could ask you to re-enroll your passkey next time you sign in, but this time requiring attestation. It’ll be phrased like “we’re upgrading your account security, please click ‘Accept’ to proceed”.
> banks could require [...a] signature of some sandboxed secure element that runs independently from the application OS
They can. Why don’t they?
How? Almost none of their users own an authenticator capable of attestation (i.e., a Yubikey or similar).
> They can. Why don’t they?
They can't, because open/neutral access secure elements do not exist yet, and nobody really wants to carry an external one.
It just took a decade worth of waiting after the first failed attempt by MS to push TPM support.
The only device categories where Secure Boot and Remote Attestation are either disabled, unsupported or not usable for the purpose of trusted attestation are many Linux systems and Android devices not sanctioned by Google.
Not sure how DRM factors in here; it's a completely different problem space. Or is your stance something like "anything even theoretically capable of performing trusted computing is evil"?
I haven’t checked, but I suppose both Google and Apple have passkeys implementations capable of attestation? (If not, it should be fairly easy to add, and considering Google has been pushing for various “integrity” bullshit, this would be a no-brainer for them.)
> They can't, because open/neutral access secure elements do not exist yet, and nobody really wants to carry an external one.
I’m not 100% sure if this would work: https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...
Presumably, banks trust Google, so if Android doesn’t erase attestation information from the HSM when unlocking the bootloader, they could use this process to verify that the key they’ve generated is stored there, regardless of whatever other software the user is running. (If Android does erase attestation info then eh, it’s just as bad as relying on Play Integrity APIs.)
> I’m not 100% sure if this would work: [...]
I believe it might, but like you I'm not sure if they really don't measure some secure boot properties into that keystore these days.
It's also usually implemented in TEEs and attested by the device manufacturer, which means there's a high chance of getting either insecure implementations in the mix or ending up with a heterogeneous mess of supported and non-supported manufacturers varying from bank to bank.
FIDO at least has their manufacturer directory; not sure if Google has something similar for Android (and if it does, whether non Google certified Android OEMs may apply).
> Apple used to support attestation but removed it. That alone makes it non-viable for sites to enforce attestation.
Again, for now. Apple might have less incentives to bring it back than Google, sure, but their products are not really known for being open platforms either.
So I set up my own self hosted provider, and transfer the keys to it, and ... how is this any different from not being attested? The entire point of attestation is to whitelist providers so a requirement for universal transfer would seem to defeat the purpose.
I appreciate an enterprise wanting attestation for certain things, but I don't think consumer oriented protocols should support it. I also think it would make more sense for protocols to support some sort of arbitrarily extensible co-signing scheme instead of device attestation. So corporate keeps a registry of secure elements they own and which users are associated with each one. So there's no way for a vendor to lock authentication (or whatever else) to a specific OEM but corporate IT (or an end user or etc) would still be capable of binding credentials to some subset of physical devices.
...get it certified, then transfer the keys to it. Or more likely you get an HSM and use its certification.
> I don't think consumer oriented protocols should support it.
Ideally yeah, that’s my point of view as well. In the corporate land however...
> binding credentials to some subset of physical devices
I don’t think that’s the goal. My guess is, they want to be able to transfer some passkeys but not allow any copies, and this only works if one device trusts another. It could work still with your scheme (store a private key on each device; when transferring a secret, make one device encrypt it to the other and immediately destroy its own copy, and make IT department sign any transfer requests so they can check whether they own both devices).
Unfortunately this is fundamentally at odds attestation: If you trust anybody capable of providing a syntactically valid signature, it's not attestation anymore.
You can try and set up a neutral clearinghouse vetting attestation providers, but that itself will probably become a centralizing force itself, requiring expensive audits etc. – think web PKI certificate authorities, but even more complex (as you need keys in shipped end user devices, not just somebody's data center HSMs).
I think shunning attestation is largely the right move, with a very short list of exceptions (high trust e-signatures, high value bank transactions but not daily payment confirmation etc.)
It is a problem, but isn’t FIDO acting as this body already wrt attestation in WebAuthn? I’m only building on top of this existing process.
Regardless, a sibling commenter has a good idea of how to sidestep this in corporate environment, and I think it should work for most of actually useful purposes.
> I think shunning attestation is largely the right move
I’m glad we’re on the same page :-) But as long as we have attestation for passkeys, I think we should at least make it as hard as humanly possible to (ab)use it as a general device attestation scheme.
There is an alternative* of which I haven't heard in a while.
* https://uattest.net
If you're dealing with a legal oligopoly then it is expected that the quality won't be so great.
To suggest that people should stop using Passkeys over this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All of these features of Passkeys are appropriate in a given context. The only concern is where a service that might not need/justify "high security" Passkeys starts demanding them anyway, and no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case.
Nah, it's fair to regard anything that supports remote attestation as toxic and aggressively thrust it into the biohazard waste incinerator. Any whiff of remote attestation, even being adjacent to it, and an angry mob should appear to burn your entire castle to the ground. Deters companies from wanting to be associated with it.
Also impedes the motte and bailey where they claim you can opt out of it until it's entrenched enough that you can't.
> no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case.
Until something with a monopoly or both halves of a duopoly or a strong network effect starts demanding it.
What remotely attested passkeys will really start being adopted for -- blocking consumer AI agent use.
Think about how many billable products are essentially convenience automation on top of a user's existing access in a platform?
What if consumers start using AI agents to interact with platforms in ways that skip those billing toll gates (because their agents are remixing actions / data on the user side)?
Both the intended (I'm skipping a premium charge) and unintended (I used a hacked agent and/or my agent went awry) are going to become major issues for companies in the next 5 years.
And the question will be asked "Can't we just ban user AI from using our app?"
Attested passkeys are going to be an awfully tempting option to reach for as an answer. Especially for banks. (Fuck banks' technology stacks)
The advantage of passkeys is that no one can trick you into giving your passkeys to the wrong person. Every time this comes up, people say "I don't need that! I've got a password manager. I'm too smart to get tricked." But they are wrong.
The possibility that sites will require attested keys does seem pretty remote at the moment, but if passkeys take off and >95% of people use keys tied to their phone, I could totally see sites starting to prevent you using a key from Bitwarden. I don't think there's a conspiracy trying to achieve this, but the incentives of security & lock-in could push us there.
You won't be able to use your google account passkey to log into the perfect clone of "gmail.com" where the 'a' is actually a greek or cyrillic letter or something, and neither will your ageing parents. You could still paste your password into the fake site from your password manager, or the spyware on your computer could still sniff it from your clipboard.
I'm somewhat desensitized to this myself for non-bank use cases. It's unfortunately necessary with corporate merges and rebrands. After all, how is my password manager supposed to know that it's safe to fill my hulu.com password on disneyplus.com? The same applies to mobile apps providing some-outsourcing-vendor.com instead of my-actual-service-provider.com etc.
For passkeys, there's native support for that type of thing using "related origin requests": https://web.dev/articles/webauthn-related-origin-requests
Yes. That is a feature, not a bug.
Transferability and delegation of authority are features. Calling them "phishing vectors" only makes them seem like a bug.
Being able to give your Hulu or Bank of America password to your spouse is a feature, but giving it to a scammer is a bug.
Can't have one without the other, but I disagree making credentials non-transferrable is the right choice.
Hopefully after thoroughly checking the URL but you only have two minutes before the Uber gets here and just need to get this one last thing done ASAP...
Like how everyone stopped using Google/Gmail, Facebook/Instagram and Windows/Office365 and flocked to alternatives?
Let's flip your suggestion. What if someone says if you need "high security" build a competing service that enforces it, no one is forcing you to use a "low security" service ?
My point was not about getting critical mass, it's that the service can already do anything they like to lock people into whatever they want and gatekeep their service. They can do it with Passkeys, or they can do it with a proprietary alternative and if they're big enough, they'll get away with it. Neither of us can sway them at all - I wasn't saying they should do this, only that they can.
Blaming Passkeys is aiming at the wrong target. Passkeys rightly offer features that have valid use-cases, even the attestation in the right context. Can they be abused? Probably, but so can just about anything. Passkeys do, on the other hand, offer some real tangible benefits that other mainstream solutions do not.
Let the usecases that need passkeys use it.
Why can't there be a parallel standard with similar features that doesn't have the parts that can potentially be abused. If the difference between abuse and non-abuse is a vague promise and the good graces of corporate structures, it is better to err on the side of caution and demand solutions that make it impossible.
> The people don't care enough to bother, and that's fine - it's not your (or my) place to force other people to do anything.
Yeah it wasn't your place or anyone else's. How can you or I force anyone. Not sure why that even came up.
Debate is how we evolve new and alternate solutions. Handwaving by saying not your place or mine is not how we affect change if needed.
Passkeys exist now and there's no taking them back. However, even if they did not, the government might well just develop its own authentication system and require that it be used under policies that require age verification for social media, for example. Hell, they might end up doing that anyway, and that would be no different. If the government wants to force tracking/verification on certain websites, it won't simply be something they walk away from if Passkeys don't exist. You can only fight this with your vote and by not using those services once they implement such controls.
I mean, we can take them back. Everybody refuse to use them and cause as much trouble as possible for anyone who tries to make you. Use TOTP or similar instead.
> If the government wants to force tracking/verification on certain websites, it won't simply be something they walk away from if Passkeys don't exist.
The way you fight things like this is by making it so the current technology is incapable of doing it and then if they try to legislate it, you have more time to roll back the policy before the technology to support it can be developed and imposed on everyone.
Implementing support for the dystopian technology before the law even requires it is the opposite of that.
The main problem in my mind is on the side of the vendors, attestation, secure hardware, etc is all an excuse to lock you in to their device/ecosystem.
Attestation is already putting the screws onto open computing, and the frog is already on the boil.
More context: I've been saying this a lot about this in the scan and go at sams club and how there are fanatics that act like it's a good thing and to be the only way to pay.
This is a great point as banks already did exactly this and to me this seems like a very strong proof that we can't rely on "vigorously calling out"
I really wish WebAuthN critics could finally update on this point. There is so much else to complain about, but nobody will listen to somebody regurgitating points stale by several years.
From [0] (via [1]), we have the following statement from an unnamed Apple Systems Engineer:
Sounds to me like Apple is working hard to enable attestation. It also sounds like attestation _might_ also require sharply restricting -if not preventing- freedom to sync the attested credential.[0] <https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/708982> (FYI: You'll need to click a button to see the second paragraph in my pull quote)
[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988852>
Why would that suddenly change in Netflix or some other company's favor at Apple's direct expense?
So you are now locked in to the apple ecosystem forever. You now need Apple to watch Netflix from your Samsung TV.
I'm trying to get a source on this but failing, do you have a link or some wwwdc sessions where Apple detail their stance ?
I see your angle, but would take their comments more at face value: their concern is really sync, anything privacy probably being the nice side effect.
Sync has been part of their strategy for a while now, from revamping the whole iMessage stack to allow for sync, to their work on eSim etc. so the move doesn't break with their recent trends either.
If passkeys are intended for platform lock-in then Big Tech is doing a really bad job...
But man... I cannot tell you how many people don't even notice the walls of the garden. Besides Apple is in competition with some huge players, more than capable of offering "Done with Apple literally trapping you? Follow this link and we'll transfer your passkeys."
That ship has sailed a long time ago.
Most people still hanging to that part have already built a whole way of life around the Apple ecosystem and the boundaries and how to work around them have become second nature to them.
The iPhone is now near 20y old, the world also changed, most got enshitificated, and looking at kids and elderlies dealing with their iPhones and macs none of it "just works".
Looking at Japan, it was the bastion of iPhone predominance, but I'm the latest numbers 30+ yo gradually got off the train to move to android as their phone is just becoming another tool to them.
I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time though.
I'm on Android and my kid got my old iPhone. Parental controls can't be set by me.
My Apple ID still tried to contact my old iPhone when logging in as a dev.
I don't need to expand on iMessage and where messages go, it's part of the lore at this point. My wife's airport auto-swirching was also a mess to the point she disabled it.
Google Maps' time line features get randomly shut off and you only know it way after the fact.
The list just goes on and on. I also have my frustrations on other platforms, I'm just pointing out Apple is far from being great. People just get used to the rough edges after a while and tout it as "good enough".
That's the whole point of the FIDO specs. This is now literally impossible to do. All the vendors are weirdly okay with this I believe it's because it cuts both ways.
https://rmondello.com/2026/09/07/switching-password-managers...
https://fidoalliance.org/download-credential-exchange-specif...
They could start doing it tomorrow. They just have to flip the switch.
What’s your point?
I believe Android still has the option to use hardware attestation, but that automatically opts credentials out of cross-device synchronization, but Apple's veto alone is enough to make attestation non-viable.
If this can't make the "WebAuthN implies mandatory attestation!!" critics update, I wonder if anything can, and how useful their criticism still is.
I don't get why this whole "they used to support it but removed it" is supposed to be an argument for anything.
And the sad truth is: Most people have no password manager at all. They are used to re-generate new passwords every time they want to log in! I'd wager that on some websites the vast majority of people are loggin in by pressing "I forgot my password".
I still am using passkeys for some sites because they otherwise force you into insecure processes like SMS-based 2FA with implied humiliation rituals, but banks are the worst offenders and they seem to like discriminating against open source password managers, so while they are not using attestation I am still patching my password manager to lie about its identity. Hopefully this will become more common in the future.
https://github.com/jchv/nixos-config/blob/c85e4ecb7434603ec1...
As for the browser permission prompt: Firefox simply warns you that the site is "requesting extended information about your security key [sic] which may affect your privacy." [1] It does not make it at all clear to the user that what's really happening is that the website is gating acces behind a specific approved software stack. If I use a non-widely-used OS or device, what website is going to approve its attestation credentials?
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/8e9ac3e12bba...
1) There is this new entirely optional feature, but it's not relevant to you, so feel free to ignore it.
2) The feature is now active by default, but no worries, there is a simple button for you to opt-out.
3) The feature is active by default, but because we value our users, there is an option in the advanced settings to deactivate it.
4) Our data shows that 99.9% of users activated the feature, but if you belong to the handful of diehards who still refuse to use it (rolls eyes), you can use this obscure command line flag or about:config entry to turn it off
5) Managing opt-out infrastructure for the feature has significant maintenance and security cost that we feel, we can no longer justify. Therefore, effective in three months, the opt-out flags will stop working and the feature will become mandatory. According to our metrics, this will affect 0.0001% of our users, so no disruption is expected.
1. You can't use Firefox with our website (when I got this popup, I thought I had been transported back in time 20 years, but with Chrome substituted for IE).
2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
2a. I ran some tests; it's the domain itself, not the host, so e.g. [email protected] is allowed but not a [email protected], even if hosted by google).
2b. After a bit of back-and-forth with support: "No, we won't tell you the list of allowed domains, but gmail and hotmail both will work."
I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.
"Ok, first, to verify you, what's your phone number?" (oh no, it's one of those, because why do they need to ask...) "<my phone number>" "Ok, you'll receive a te— oh. Oh no. This is not a real phone number. What's your REAL phone number?"
Incredible... if I ever get that I'll enjoy pointing out I've had my domain longer than gmail has existed.
How I wish this were true for (US) banks. They usually force whatever new hell on you they just came up with without asking, or in fact even telling you about it.
The most bizarre instance I've seen so far: "We have unilaterally added this phone number we believe to be in your name (surely cell carriers have better KYC than we do!) to your account as the only SMS-OTP authentication method and are choosing to disregard the one we've had on file for years since it's an evil VoIP number. Please do not contact us again without access to the former number for authentication."
My computers and devices feel less and less like tools under my control and doing my bidding, and more and more like something controlled by faraway tech companies, to do their bidding.
I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.
At the market, there is a high cost to managing cash and so some of the small sellers will only accept cash reluctantly or not sell because they can't break notes.
Used car? Bank transfer.
It is also safer than carrying loads of money on you while you sell stuff on the street.
I think the other part is speed. They know the cost, type it into a machine and then tap to pay, onto the next customer!
Guarantee any individual market stall seller would rather take exact cash than not make a sale at all. Small firms might not, since their cashiers have to work in the process the owner sets. Owner-operators will do anything for money or soon go out of business.
Even where it's "technically" possible, it's becoming more difficult. Some grocery stores around here don't staff traditional teller lanes at night, shrinking down to only self-checkout, which are card-only machines. To pay cash, you'll have to escalate to the roaming attendant (or at least, I assume they can find some way to accept cash for that transaction? I can't say I've tried)
I think some theme parks have started. Not accepting cash should be illegal, and certain places have started implementing laws that make the practice illegal. There are various reasons why a person is unable to have a bank account.
This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.
Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.
Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.
Attestation is necessary for corp use cases. Adding it as an option to WebAuthn is better than forcing more standards to be developed.
Would a website want you to have to use Apple Passwords to guarantee that the account you're creating is connected to an Apple account, and thus making it more likely that you're a real, non-anonymous human?
edit: Why not just require "Sign in with Apple/Google" if that's the goal?
The US has thousands of banks, and nobody tells them how to authenticate their customers – they just all end up doing the same few horrible things, since nobody ever gets fired for doing what all their peers do (and maybe a little bit more to be sure).
"I'm different!" says this particular scorpion - yeah yeah, I don't believe you.
1. Many services have old users with passwords that predate password-strength meters (or their ill-conceived brethren: password complexity rules). The service provider knows these passwords keep falling, and the cost of having to deal with stolen accounts is very real: customer support calls, reimbursements and investigation. But I've rarely seen services that force users to upgrade their passwords (even though it's a very easy solution). Whenever I've offered doing this myself, it was always shut down (either immediately or 3 years down the line) by a myriad of seemingly unrelated stakeholders.
2. To go further than this, companies can also know for certain that some credentials have been leaked by looking at password breach aggregators like Have I been Pwned and forcing users with affected accounts to change their passwords. That too, is rarely done.
3. 2FA (with SMS or TOTP) has existed for ages now, yet very few major non-financial services have made 2FA mandatory by forcing you to register an authenticator app or a verified phone number[1].
4. Webauthn was available in Chrome and Firefox in 2018, and got pretty widespread support by 2020. The "Passkeys" brand was not a thing yet, but the basic functionality was there and both hardware and software support was quite solid. It still took several years for services to even start offering Webauthn to users, beyond small and limited trials. The rationale was simple: UX around Webauthn was still rough, syncing and transferring credentials were still unsolved and the worst part was "What do we even ask the user to do?". The broad concept of passkeys is extremely confusing, but the non-concept we had before was far more confusing. Supporting Webauthn back in 2020 would have given tremendous security benefits for power users who could have understood it and deal with the rougher UX back then, but nobody wanted to take the risk of regular users setting up a passkey, losing it and locking down their account.
5. Now that passkeys are being supported by more and more services, you still don't see them being pushed very hard. Passkeys are great for the service provider, since they just kill a big category of security incidents, but even then you're see pretty conservative adoption. And I've never seen a single service forcing you to use Passkeys.
My point in all these examples is that most companies are extremely conservative here. Forcing users to do something that might confuse them, break their account or frustrate them is risky, since you may lose a very real chunk of your customer base. Sometimes you have to do this, the costs from keeping the old way or the benefits or forcing the change have to be high enough to justify that. Think about how long it took for companies to drop support for IE6. The cost was high, but as long as it still had a sizable market share, it was hard to do. Google was probably the first major company to take steps towards killing IE6 support, and this was famously entirely bottom-up, and was done by engineers either hiding it from their bosses or tricking them[2].
With this trend. I personally find the scenario where non-copyable attested passkeys are forced on everyone unlikely. OP keeps mentioning Netflix, but streaming services are a rather special case, most service providers would get very little benefit from restricting users to an attested non-copyable passkey. Why would they risk all that friction for... nothing at all?
The more real risk with attestations (and we're already started seeing it) is that some services (namely banks) will use attestations to limit you to use their own shitty app instead of using a proper passkey.
---
[1] Keep in mind I'm only talking about companies that already had password-based accounts without 2FA. Companies that started out with a simple username and password are rarely forcing their users to add 2FA. The farthest they generally went is sending you an OTP code or link on a verified email address they already had, and this is usually only done for sensitive operations, a new browser and/or a suspicious location.
Email OTPs, notably, aren't 2FA by definition, since your Email address might be only password-protected, and at the worst case (and excruciatingly common) scenario it might be sharing exactly the same password as your service. Companies would love to have all their users using a stronger solution, so they can stop having to deal with all these pesky credential stuffing botnets, but not at the cost of losing a non-negligible portion of their customer base.
[2] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
and the other is a laptop, capable of doing none of that
The first time I was forced to use a passkey implemented within the vendor's app (3rd party password managers were not an option). I quickly closed that account.
The second time was an app that popped up a passkey opt-in in the middle of a bunch of transaction screens. I quickly realized the error, but there was no easy undo. The opt in was one green button in the middle of the screen. Turning it back off required digging through settings to find the security option to disable, and then confirm my choice multiple times. That process also signed out all my other devices.
The fact that companies are resorting to dark patterns and forced requirements, where my money is held hostage, should be pretty good evidence of how poorly the passkey rollout is going.
It gets even worse when you want to have separate passkeys, so that you have the possibility of knowing which one was compromised and doing a partial revocation: the cloud sync now requires every device to have access to every copy, so that you can individually enroll them during registration.
Yubikey of course suffers most from this, as their hardware tokens are physically incapable of any kind of sync, so a Yubikey passkey is very quickly a single-point-of-failure. They proposed[0] a system which would allow enrolling a "backup key" (which could then be safely locked in a vault, far away from day-to-day use), but with the various Big Tech companies pushing their own proprietary cloud-synced passkey implementations that of obviously went nowhere.
[0]: https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-proposes-webauthn-protoco...
No they don't? A passkey is fundamentally just a private key pair, which can be copied around just like a very long password. Of course if you store it inside one hardware enclave and want to move it to another hardware enclave you have a problem, but for software implementations it's simply a client UX issue.
The protocol requires additional keys to sign a challenge during registration, so at best you have to load a pre-generated key from the safe when creating a new account. In practice, you generate a new key for every account, so between generating the key and storing it in your safe there's no backup but cloud sync.
This prevents using backup storage that is safer but inconvenient to access, and also prevents registering accounts on-the-go.
The "device" can be entirely virtual. I've written a passkey-compatible OIDC provider for use on my homelab and it uses passkeys. But the passkeys are just in a SQLite database, which can be copied wherever.
That's not advisable for security, which is one reason I've not released the provider for others to use, but passkeys can operate just fine with that.
If I wanted, the private key itself just be in something like AWS KMS instead of a SQLite database, and it would all still work fine. Nothing about passkeys itself requires a hardware device or that the key be unexportable.
That's all true, but also not the point of this thread (offline backups) or the post (attestation limiting user freedom).
Perhaps surprisingly, Windows has helped keep Passkeys from being "proprietary" lock-in because Microsoft no longer has users in a single ecosystem.
There is no dedicated auto-enrollment for "backup" keys, but most consumer sites make it very easy to enroll "backup" keys yourself.
Also, Passkeys don't have to be "online" to enroll additional keys. Each key is independent, enrolling is just generating new keys. The trouble is that web browsers generate lots of Passkeys (at least one per domain, at the very least) so if you in theory want to print them all and store them in a physical vault it might be a hefty book you are printing.
Cloud sync isn't required. Most users want it so that they don't have a single-point-of-failure.
As an implementation detail some Passkeys have a master key that is then used in some key derivation function (KDF) to generate the hundreds or thousands of individual passkeys (at least one per domain), and that's what most Yubikey passkey implementations need to do because Yubikeys weren't designed to store lots of keys, so it is devices like Yubikey that makes it seem like Passkeys are less independent than they really are.
> so a Yubikey passkey is very quickly a single-point-of-failure
It is a single point of failure when there is one. As soon as you use two, then it's not a single point a failure anymore, is it?
The counter argument I usually read is: "Yeah but it is not practical, because you need 3 yubikeys: the first 2 with you, that you enroll everywhere, and one in a safe. And every time you add a new passkey, you need to go get the one in the safe, replace it by another one, and enroll the one of the safe. You can't spend your life driving between your desk and your safe".
But I have been using multiple Yubikeys for... 8 years now I think? I don't remember the last time I enrolled and important key. Sure, once in a while I add a website, and it is a bit annoying to have to enroll the other Yubikeys at a different time. But it really doesn't happen that often, and anyway most of those websites allow me to recover my account with my email. So it is actually practical to have a "convenience yubikey" for websites that don't matter so much, and in case this Yubikey dies... well those websites were not so important, and anyway I can recover from my email.
The difference for the important websites (and really, I don't think I have really important websites in my life that don't allow me to recover by going in person with my ID, but for the sake of the argument) is that I actually do have multiple Yubikeys, one of which is stored away.
Whereas the master password of my Bitwarden account is a single point of failure, and the security of my online Bitwarden account is as well.
- Relying on emails for account recovery has the downside of preventing anonymous accounts.
- Have you ever lost your "convenience yubikey"? People underestimate how painful mass account recovery can be.
- The cost of 3 yubikeys can be substantial for some demographics.
- Important accounts are not properly backed up until you drive to your safe. That can be many days for a bank deposit box, or even longer if you're traveling.
Overall that's a lot of compromises for what should have been just "put this recovery key/password in a safe and forget about it until needed", if the protocol was better. And definitely not something that can be widely recommended.
This probably makes your use case somewhat unusual...
> I actually do have multiple Yubikeys, one of which is stored away.
...and this probably puts you in the 0.0001th or so percentile of users. It's really a great security strategy if you can pull it off, but practically almost nobody can.
My feeling would be that "normal people" can always recover their accounts from their main email, which makes the main email the only "important" account. So having a Yubikey always plugged in is a "nice convenience".
Now to be honest, I would expect that "normal people" are absolutely fine with passkeys on their smartphone, and don't consider it a "trap".
I would just expect that people who consider it a trap are able to use a Yubikey the way I do.
I think the people most likely to be hurt by it being a trap are unfortunately those least likely to be able to juggle multiple Yubikeys.
True, most solutions today don't do this, which makes onboarding of fraudulent additional instances to some cloud-synced vault a big security concern, but I don't think it's fundamentally impossible.
This! Passkeys would have been tough for me to adopt without this ability. Now passkeys are significantly more convenient that any other MFA method.
Bitwarden lets you export your vault, and the export contains the private key in plain text. There is virtually no difference to writing down a password on a piece of paper. Well, I guess a passkey is a lot longer than the avg password.
This changes if attestation ever becomes widespread. Which will only happen if Apple does a U-turn on their stance.
The big difference is not just that a passkey is a private key, it's that the server you register the passkey within holds only the corresponding public key. They don't have a copy of your password (long or otherwise), not even a hashed version of it that could be recovered from a password database dump of the server.
This is a big improvement compared to the days of having your "strong password" end up on the dark web somewhere.
Can you export it from there? My main gripe with passkeys in 1Password is that seemingly you can't export them, unless you export it to "someone else", which isn't clear if that someone can be just "you".
I agree that is annoying.
This was my expectation too, but since I haven't figured out 100% that it is actually possible, I haven't used any of it.
Yes you need to put thought into who you trust to provide password management but for most people having a professional third party help them improve how they use passwords will be a benefit to security overall.
Sigh. It's OpenID (the original one) all over again? Everyone wants to be the auth provider, nobody wants to accept other auth providers.
Want to dance? Yes | Maybe Later
I remember that comment, it's perfect.
For any given Passkey-enabled service you use, you can have multiple Passkeys - ideally one per device, and it doesn't prevent you from also authenticating with another method, such as username and password.
I use passkeys all the time and absolutely have this on every account I care about.
> Addendum: I feel I have made a compelling case for passkeys in this article. And I haven’t even pointed out one of their best security features: they are (in most use cases) domain-bound, meaning they are resistant to what are called Man-In-The-Middle attacks.
"I made a compelling case... but didn't point out the most important security feature that motivated passkeys in the first place"
Honestly I don't think this post did make a compelling case. There's a lot of assuming bad faith on the part of the FIDO alliance, while completely missing that preventing MITM attacks was a key design feature. The FIDO alliance members deal with stolen accounts all the time, and passkeys largely solve that. Stealing accounts is almost always done with phishing or social engineering, and passkeys solve the former and reduce the surface for the latter.
The protections against MITM you mentioned is probably the biggest one, but the other one in the back of my mind is TOTP is a shared secret. So a compromise of the server side allows impersonation of users undetected, which can be a big problem. Maybe I'm over reacting because no company has ever lost a copy of it's database and they're all super secure. But, imagine trying to argue as a user I didn't do a thing when there is an audit log saying we challenged the user for TOTP and it was provided, was definitely the users fault.
Especially considering how easy it still is to do a SIM swap.
If you aren't talking from a US perspective, where are you that SIM swap is a low bar?
Passkeys are unphishable. It’s technically impossible for someone else to capture your passkey and use it themselves. It’s technically impossible for your passkey to be leaked from a website.
This is what makes Passkeys the superior solution - they bake the security into itself rather than throwing up its hands and hoping all the other weakest links do the right thing consistently.
Heh.
Several months ago, I found myself in need of a new phone. I even had the means to do an orderly transition, with the old one still in hand and mostly working.
My mobile provider was an MVNO that was also my home ISP. I had enabled "enhanced security" to prevent ev0l hackerz from swapping my SIM without authorization. It turns out that this mode is so secure that it prevented me and the support staff from a normal upgrade procedure.
There were various glitches along the way, and a conversation with certain LLMs indicated that the SIM->eSIM disparity was also causing trouble, and with the online system's rejection of authentication I decided it was expedient to walk into their nearby storefront location.
It turns out that the salespeople in the storefronts are not really empowered in any technical way, except they were quite capable of changing my password without any reason, and wasting my time, so leaving the store empty-handed after mind games from three haughty female STEM dropouts was rather infuriating.
The process eventually succeeded after giving it a little time, space, and grace, but it looks like I'm leaving "enhanced security" disabled if it's so customer-hostile.
If the credentials get stolen from a website database, they’re useless for every other website on earth. No matter how poorly they’re stored, it’s just a public key and is not useful. Hell, they can get code executing on the webserver that collects full login information, and it’s not useful.
Passwords always require full transmission. Hashing for storage requires a proper implementation, which we’ve seen does not happen. 100% of the time. There’s a reason hackers are still stealing passwords from websites after three decades.
Passkeys solve that. Nothing else available to the average user does.
Into a hash algorithm not to a remote server.
>Nothing else available to the average user does.
Literally every person could use a unique password for each login.
You know what MITM is, yes? There are a ton of points between you and that hash algorithm, and any single one immediately and permanently compromises you.
Meanwhile passkeys are completely invulnerable.
Yeah, it's just a bunch of "big company bad!"
Yes, Google and Twitter and Yahoo are just trying to get your data and sell ads, but I fail to see how Passkeys furthers that specific goal. Even if these companies have bad motivations in certain parts of their business, they all have an incentive to make accounts more secure (to reduce fraud) and improve the user experience (to increase engagement/happiness)
Furthermore, the rest of us are the people at the companies implementing passkeys. I did an implementation recently, didn’t require attestation, and can’t imagine why I ever would.
If we’re at this level of trust for all of FIDO, why aren’t we at legislative centers doing something much more dramatic about it instead of navel gazing about how we’re the smart ones who have recognized FIDO’s next big trick? How is attestation the problem here?
Users constantly fall for website impersonation, this can be solved by your password manager it just has to check the host and the certificate of the login page.
Now browsers don't let password managers do that, I wonder why.
But lets say you don't like the fact that passwords are sent over the wire. I get that I don't like that either. You could just take a random token and have an hmac signature on all your requests, for most cryptographic hashing functions that would probably be quantum secure as well.
But lets just say you don't want to have a shared secret because you know servers get hacked all the time. Totally legit, I like the way you think, asymmetric cryptography it is.
How could we possibly do it? Like ssh with pki on top.
The spec could be literally these 25 words:
Do what ssh does but request a PKI signed certificate instead of a key signature from the server and validate it against your known CAs.
There's functionally no alternative for consumer logins, and certainly not one that doesn't require learning what PKI is. "like SSH with PKI" is a bit "draw the rest of the owl".
Which is exactly what Passkeys does. And it also has built-in functionality to prevent any kind of "Oops! We changed our login method, just ignore the warning and retrieve it manually." social engineering, which a user would often genuinely see when random services move their login page to a different url.
Passkeys are an end run on general purpose hardware largely under your own control, which is a much bigger issue in scale than dealing with customers who can’t access the services they pay for because of some byzantine security or know your customer laws/procedures.
I bought a house earlier this year and the bank froze my deposit I sent to the real estate agent.
I rang the bank straight away and badgered them to unlock it ASAP in case the sale fell through for their BS fraud department to sift it.
They blamed the fact the real estate they’d never transacted with before, I politely told them they’re based in one state while I was purchasing in another.
It took 2 hours of back and forth to get them to send it, even after they did all their security questions.
It’s all a fugazi, they/governments do not want you having large amounts of money - it’s as simple as that.
If they have something like this in place, they will have greater confidence in the transaction being genuine and less likely to block it. In this case, for such a large amount of money, relative to the size of your account, they might still be very cautious about it, but it would be less likely to cause an issue.
My point is the gains are overstated the main weakness is almost always user action. Passkeys will not magically solve all our security problems.
Instead we’re increasingly locked out of devices we buy and told/mandated this is how you’ll use them.
This only becomes real if you don't have e-mail fallback access to your account. Something which seems like a very bad idea.
Passkeys aren't solving for security nerds who like portability and have 30 character long passwords, they're solving for grandpa who will happily read their bank's 2FA SMS to the "bank" over the phone. The FIDO alliance has literally billions more of these users than they do users who know what hardware attestation is and how it impacts their auth workflows.
And Grandpa will have fun if he has to juggle 20 passkeys with different security requirements on his devices.
But as I said, there are plenty of UX issues with passkeys, those UX issues however don't include getting your accounts hacked, phished, passwords lost in data breaches, etc, which I'd suggest are a lot worse.
> I attest that this user's advertising ID is 12345, and for a fee I'll tell you all about what they've been up to.
Think of how much money they're just leaving on the table by letting us authenticate in ways that don't create such a side channel.
But there’s definitely a kernel of truth here. 1Password recently began to enforce userVerification: required[1][2], and suddenly on the desktop without TouchID I have to enter my login password to use the passkey on a good number of websites. I didn’t sign up for 1Password 15 years ago so that I have to enter both my very complex master password and very complex login password to sign into websites, the “one password” contract is suddenly broken after 15 years. This experience independently alarmed me about the additional constraints potential of the passkey standard and power wielded by the FIDO Alliance and partnering organizations addressed in TFA, which are, to be clear, useful for security in an organization. (We use userVerification: preferred now btw.)
Therefore, I believe the passkey technology is great for enforcing a standard of security in an organization and stand by my choice for my org. But as a general purpose B2C auth tech, if the additional constraints become widely adopted, user freedom will be seriously harmed.
Edit: I asked Opus 5.5 to vibe code a passkey auth solution in Go a few times without saying anything specific about userVerification. It chose required each time. So expect to see more of these. Oh and vibe coding auth without understanding it entirely is bad, please don’t do that.
[1] https://web.dev/articles/webauthn-user-verification
[2] https://www.1password.community/1password-at-home-31/user-ve...
It immediately creates a huge lock-in in a hard-to-notice way. Luckily, I did noticed early on and manually removed the 20 or so passkeys I had created.
Earlier this year, I lost my iPhone and restored from backup. I was shocked to see that I could log into my 1Password account using only the master-key, and that the secret-key was not required. 1Password clearly stated that the secret-key was required to setup a new device, but it turns out that they also (perhaps recently) configure it to upload to all devices in your iCloud account[1]. Ever since then, I've lost faith in 1Password's ability to communicate their security model to me and started looking for an off-ramp.
[1] https://support.1password.com/secret-key-security/
https://rmondello.com/2026/09/07/switching-password-managers...
https://fidoalliance.org/download-credential-exchange-specif...
For the iCloud syncing, I believe they've done that since iCloud Keychain/Apple Passwords was first a thing; I've been aware of it since they introduced it, but perhaps that was more explicit when it was first added. The comment below from a now-defunct 1Password employee account describes the thinking there:
> Importantly, the entire role of the Secret Key is to protect you from us and anything that might happen on our end, like a breach of 1Password’s servers. It does not (and can not) protect you from a local attack. This is mentioned in 1Password’s Security Design white paper [ed: on page 74 of an old PDF; I've linked the newer HTML document below], which goes into detail about the locally exposed Secret Key.
https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/10iqhdp/comment/...
https://agilebits.github.io/security-design/index.html
I do get why that might be surprising. Without going through the whole onboarding process on a fresh device I can't say how well they highlight that or how easy it is to blow past. All I can say is 1) I've known about it for years and 2) having read through the white paper of how iCloud Keychain works I _personally_ trust iCloud Keychain/Passwords about as much as I trust 1Password, maybe _slightly_ more - but I am also not a security professional, so take my word with very little salt :)
And for the record, this is not impossible. Bitwarden does it[3] via the magic of "ignoring the part of the specification that says not to give users their data." Any open source software would do the same. This is why 1Password is no longer the "good guys" despite having rationalizations for their actions.
[1] https://support.1password.com/export/
[2] https://support.1password.com/1pux-format/
[3] https://bitwarden.com/help/export-your-data/
Does (more) here include free software like keepassxc and friends which don't restrict what key owners do with their keys? Last I heard, FIDO was moving to ban them.
Though, I do find it amusing that I commented about 1password's inability to communicate their security model, and your reply links a reddit post[1] in which everyone is disagreeing over whether or not iCloud secret key syncing actually occurs.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/10iqhdp/comment/...
It means "Just shut up and use it, someone's bonus and/or promotion packet is depending on the usage metrics.". :P
If you're building a Passkey-based login page and you specify "userVerification: preferred" or "userVerification: discouraged" you are essentially reducing your security to a single factor - namely the "something you have" one.
* On Windows you can enable Windows Hello for biometric authentication.
* On Mac, as shit as it is, you can buy Apple's magic keyboard with TouchID (for crazy money, but still) and use it while the notebook is shut.
I hope 1Password can eventually consider adding something like face recognition from a webcam as an alternative method.
Unfortunately, without this they are not compliant and it gives a false sense of security to claim it is multi-factor when it's actually only one factor. You'll find the same with other Passkey stores like Kevault that require biometrics as well.
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/117428259125...
> 1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!)
This is a matter of opinion. Personally I think making a technology understandable is more important than incomprehensible but secure.
> 2. Describing TOTP as a “great solution” for adding security to a password-based account. When the most common threat model on the web is phishing (a word the post never mentions!), TOTP hardly buys you _anything_. TOTP is phishable.
Phishing isn’t a big threat to regular consumers. It’s a bigger threat to workers at corporations and government agencies. These places have IT departments. They have better solutions than passkeys, including using a Yubikey as a second factor. It may be based on WebAuthn but it’s not a passkey.
> 3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed.
Why are the logical leaps? I don’t see any. What I see is clearly delineated hypotheses for future scenarios. We can’t predict the future but the original author is predicting a particularly dire future, whereas rmondello is predicting a better future.
Can you back that up with data? Anecdotally regular people get phished all the time, why do you think banks are sending out frequent reminders, show banners on their websites and apps about phishing attempts in the wild and mail providers explicitly showing if something is an official Google / Fastmail communication and when it's not.
When I see phishing mail they are always for banking, Google / iCloud accounts and not specifically targeted at "corporate" or government agencies.
I don't agree with the conclusion, though.
TOTP is great, flexible, and keeps the user in control; however, using a passkey in a flexible password manager (Bitwarden, keepass, 1Password, etc) really does continue to give the user control. And the user experience is dramatically easier than filling in TOTP codes.
To advocate for TOTP over passkeys, we're already relying on an application to generate those numbers (authenticator apps, password managers, etc). I see no reason to not simply continue using those pieces of software to manage passkeys, too.
See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50049311 about userVerification: required. Passkey in 1Password used to be on par or slightly more difficult than filling in TOTP codes (need to click to approve rather than browser extension autofill and even auto-submit on a large number of websites) but that’s no longer true with a good number of websites requiring userVerification. Now you have to type in your login password on desktops without biometrics. Forum thread: https://www.1password.community/1password-at-home-31/user-ve...
I think the bit about TOTP was mostly a joke, the problem with passkeys is that they're billed as a replacement for passwords but they mix lots of MFA concerns in and make interoperability essentially impossible a lot of the time.
That's simply not true. I'm able to log onto GitHub on my corporate device using a passkey that's kept in 1Password on my iPhone.
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/passkeys
Passkeys are built on Webauthn (and ultimately sort of synonymous with it) and that has always been the web standard for all physical key support such as Yubikey and is basically the same as it has been for decades when dealing with Passkeys only with updated UX on top. Hardware support here is pretty good, too.
Even if your other device is a mainframe computer thousands of miles away, so long as you can photograph the QR code, you can decode it and send the data string for the passkey device needs to it.
The issue that many have with passkeys is that someone will tie a passkey to an ecosystem that they don't personally control like Apple's and then they can't get into their services without an apple device that's onboarded into Apple's ecosystem.
They’re both equally disposable. You can reset a password just like you can reset a passkey.
Yeah and neither will anyone else!
My claim is not that passkeys couldn't give you control in principle. It's that the standard readily allows for websites to prevent you from being allowed to exercise that control, and the unclear messaging and UX around passkeys means most users will not even notice should this happen.
Sure, but if you read the article you would know that deal can (and will undoubtedly) be altered. The passkey issuer can demand that the passkey be hardware-backed, and I've already run into passkeys that cannot be stored in bitwarden out in the wild (i.e. they REQUIRE that I use a TPM-backed store in my computer). Eventually it will be a particular TPM-backed store running on an attested platform. Now that's not generally the case today, but make no mistake, that IS the ultimate goal... You will only access valuable services from devices that you fundamentally have no control over (e.g. locked down OS's with attestation before you can access X,Y,Z), so that you can't steal from netflix, skip the sponsor segments on youtube, block ads in your web browser, etc. etc. etc. If you want a preview of how this might all work from the technical side, just look into how TEE works for large-scale GPU deployments right now.
And you can't really blame them. A TOTP 2FA from your password manager is not secure. It WILL be hacked sooner rather than later. And SMS is horrible, expensive, and unreliable.
So far, only FIDO keys provide hardware-backed security ("resident keys", not passkeys) that is nicely segregated into self-contained hardware module. And it does not require you to run a full end-to-end DRM-ed stack.
If you _want_ true privacy and security, that's pretty much the best case you can hope for.
The only difference is that banks will now blame you for any losses caused by hacked devices because it is on paper "unhackable" with a well-updated device, so it is now your fault that their crappy bank app's security was broken.
And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.
> Except that those "self-contained hardware modules" are actually rarely "self-contained" but usually an integral part of a smartphone running a huge bunch of mostly-untrusted code and that the containment keeps getting breached, of course.
And it actually doesn't matter if the secure device is designed correctly. Providing a secure channel over untrusted networks is something that we can do easily.
> And you still don't get to use Passkeys with banks, of course.
I can. I'm using US Bank and it supports my Yubikey-bound WebAuthn credential just fine.
> TOTP is great, flexible, and keeps the user in control
TOTP is vulnerable to MITM attacks, so it's at best acceptable.
> I’d like to be clear that there are legitimate uses of remote attestation. By using a website that requires attested passkeys you can be sure you stay safe from accidentally installing a scammer’s fake passkey application that steals your data – the website will reject such a passkey. You might want an attested Passkey even if the website doesn’t require it, since you can use attestation to verify that your software has not been tampered with by a hacker while you weren’t looking.
> As for reasons to not want attestation: you might want to be able to use software that Twitter (formally X) doesn’t specifically approve of, such as Linux. Or a phone with a refurbished operating system.
So the bad timeline is the one in which the industry gradually transitions to "you can't log on unless everything about your system is exactly as we want." Figures.
Before anybody thinks "surely they can't ban all linux users", they don't need to. The systemd folks are also working on a startup that is building verifiable computing into Linux via systemd. So, we have no choice on the matter anyway. It could become of choice of approved distro vs non approved distro.
> So the bad timeline is the one in which the industry gradually transitions to
We have been on that timeline for every other tech transgression. There are no signs that this will be a different timeline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
This 4-year-old article and its comments are worth reading again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106
Is the audience of this article the kind of people who are already using passkeys and like them? Because, if so, we’re starting at a deficit here. The author is out to get my beloved passkeys that have saved me so much time and pain.
Are passkeys perfect? No. Are they even very good for no-technical users? Absolutely not…they’re incredibly confusing for that kind of person if you ask me.
However, for my workflow, I’ll take them over a password+2FA type of situation where logging in is such an annoyance. The security part of the discussion is very interesting and a lot of the things in this article are stuff that I didn’t know before reading it.
The issue is that, putting on my user hat, I just don’t care. As long as my accounts are reasonably secure I’m much more concerned about ease of use and workflow.
Substitute apple with google, pay card with youtube comment and iphone with android for the "open" experience.
Expand on this? Haven't heard of this failure mode.
tldr from memory: Guy used 2 legitimately purchased gift cards that had been tampered and their codes were used by someone else. His account was locked with no recurse.
I think he could still use his phone, but all the online stuff were locked down. He only managed to get it back after his case reached this website(hn) and senior Apple people stepped in.
I apologize that the headline is provocative. I thought for a long time about how to appeal to both people who are barely aware of what passkeys are but also not put off people who like them. I considered calling them a "Trojan Horse" in the headline as I do in the body (i.e. legitimately lovely, but with a terrible and unobvious problem) but "trojan" has another connotation in computer security.
Nonetheless, I said what I meant. Convenience is how they get you. This convenience didn't have to come with a trap, but thanks to the way it was designed, it does.
Regarding how I feel about passkeys after reading your article, logically I am reading what you wrote and conceptually understand the trap, it’s just hard to wrap my head around what kind of situation would cause this trap to “catch” me so to speak.
I.e., the upside is real and immediate, the downside is theoretical and tied to future uncertainty.
But as for how it could "catch" you: if you use FOSS devices that are unattestable (as is the case for the LineageOS phone and Linux laptop I exclusively use), you may one day find you can't use many websites.
The title put me off completely.
I’m tired of people shitting on everything. Especially without offering any advice on how to improve things. It’s exhausting to read. And apparently it’s not even the point of the article. So why is it the title?
Very very strange choice.
The tone hair-splitting makes it seem like you weren't going to be that receptive to the point anyway, no matter how many layers of subtext are inserted to abstract away the actual point, that being - Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.
It wasn't a pointless rant, you're seemingly primed for something that didn't happen here.
It's a good argument that passkeys are a trap while TOTPs offer the security you need but avoid the absolute control passkeys may hand over, so stick with those.
With passkeys I click once and I'm in like the golden age of using the web with a password manager in 2012. It's a huge quality of life improvement. If people want to avoid passkeys for whatever reason, that's fine but not interested in reading the same slippery slope argument that gets reposted every week.
A recurring issue with these critiques is how they seemingly presuppose passkeys are an all or nothing thing, and losing your passkey means losing access entirely. Which isn't how it works basically anywhere. It's just another auth method, if you can't use a passkey you fall back to whatever recovery method is offered. If passkeys became some user hostile trap overnight I'd just unenroll them and use TOTP, SMS 2FA, email 2FA, or whatever else is supported.
And every critic always attacks this same thing. TOTP isn’t so bad, my password manager can do it. 2FA is fine it’s automatically pulled from my phone.
It’s still phishable. The password is still sent. You haven’t solved anything, you just piled more complexity on top to make it harder. People can still use the same password at 12 websites.
Passkeys never get transmitted. If you hack into a server and steal my credentials, all you get is a public key. You can’t use it at another website. A bad developer can store my password or TOTP secret in a way that makes it useful to a thief. That’s not possible with Passkeys.
No one ever offers an alternative other than saying it’s irrelevant. Despite practical experience showing otherwise.
Passkeys work and make my life better. These constant rants remind me of seeing people argue that the GUIs are a waste of time and no one will ever use them and it’s a fad that will go away and the only reason everyone’s talking about them is companies want to sell graphics cards and mice.
Suppose I had only passkeys and Google Pay. I take a train into town and lose my phone. What then? I'm screwed.
I couldn't just go home because I'd need to buy a ticket or taxi using my phone. I couldn't buy a replacement phone. I wouldn't be able to online shop on a library computer or withdraw money unless I have a physical bank branch. (I do not.) I can't even contact anyone unless I know their number and borrow a phone or find a way to send an email.
My preferred balance of risk vs convenience is: passwords in a password manager, hardware-based 2FA only for making account changes, and confirmation emails (My email password is not in my password vault.) any time a site successfully or unsuccessfully processes a login attempt.
There is no hardware element. If someone phishes my password, I'll know right away from the login email, unless they're so talented or lucky that they also accessed my email or found a way to spoof my 2FA. If I lose my phone, I'm not totally helpless. I don't see an overall downside to my strategy that isn't worse than passkeys.
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Edit: One suggested alternative I can fathom is "passkeys managed by password manager". While this does provide better security than "passwords managed in a password manager", my experience has been that passkeys are not well-implemented across all platforms where they Just Work(TM) on every site. I don't know how you'd go about using passkeys in a shared public computer setting (university lab or library) unless you can install browser extensions (and why would you want to, even if you could?). At the end of the day, these passkeys are still secured by the password manager's single master password. Regardless of what I use, I want emails when a login attempt succeeds or fails. It takes one full second to swipe away at my convenience, and I would instantly become alert to an attempt or login I didn't execute.
Passkeys in theory are great, but the capabilities of the spec are worrying. Defaults can and do change, and when they do, so follows 99% of the population, and then you find yourself either getting blocked out of services because your hardware/software doesn't comply, or you give in.
But on the other end, it might not matter anyways. Apple, Google, Cloudflare, are already pushing similar garbage and now you increasingly have to scan a QR code that verifies your mobile hardware to use a desktop.
Both Passkeys and OIDC are vendor lockin enablers due to these design choices.
I wish the next standards would keep this in mind.
Although this isn't true because actually with a password you have to choose how to generate it and everyone chooses different ways.
So many security articles just seem to be so far removed from the real world. Like, when is that ever going to happen? It's the same principle that forces people to reset their password every month. Sounds secure in principle but then everyone just writes it down.
The reality is that Passkeys are way more convenient for most people. Reducing barriers to adoption is the best thing we can do to improve security.
Did you not read the previous paragraphs where they discussed someone leaking their password in a photo?
Someone would need to:
1. Request the TOTP
2. Stand up and walk back
3. Take a photo of their desk with the TOTP visible
4. Send it to someone who can use it
All within 30-60 seconds. Just such an edge case it's not even worth thinking about.
Strong password + MFA is still the way.
That ... doesn't seem like a concern unique to passkeys, though?
It seems more like a policy rather than a technical aspect.
e.g. A website might decide they will only provide services if you upload a photo of government ID, or pass a verification where you show your face.
If it's software running on someone else's computer, you don't get full control regardless.
I'm sorry, what? Who has more than one password manager (other than a personal/work split)? That's absurd and not something anyone I've heard of would put up with
Does it not count as "passkey" then?
Yubikeys can be used as a device-bound passkey, that the FIDO2 thing.
Now software managed passkeys are also a thing and can be stored in a (good?) old password manager, of course this is less secure and could be disallowed in the future.
Thus the rant is about people without dedicated hardware keys that would have to use things like device-bound passkeys their OS instead of their password manager.
That's the kind of half assed communication that loses trust.
and the websites are usually justified in saying that.
But also, right now giving a website a passkey basically means being technically savvy or using a sensible system like the browser/OS. TOTP used to be this way, but then people got annoyed at the process and put everything into 3rd party apps that synced across devices. The same will happen with passkeys, at which point "passkeys are a website..." will morph into "attested passkeys are a website..." and the rest will remain true.
But what was (is?) wrong with FIDO / webauthn?
Passkeys offer the same and more security but are less of a pain for the user.
Convenience is precisely the thing that big tech established tech platforms want to reward their users with to keep them around. The undeniable convenience of passkeys didn't have to come with a standard that is threatening against unattestable devices like my Linux phone. But it does, and that means passkeys are a way that the industry can discourage people away from using non-Google/Apple/Microsoft-approved devices.
(Apple didn't join the FIDO Alliance on Passkeys until they made sure attestation was an optional feature and no longer a requirement, for consumer privacy reasons.)
This panic about "but what if attestation" goes for any standard that people on open source platforms use. What if browsers add attestation? You're only one update away from losing your freedom! Browsers are a conspiracy by big tech! Apple already built remote attestation into Safari under the Private Access Token system, after all.
There is no intent to kill FOSS, not even from Microsoft anymore. The reality is much worse: nobody really cares about FOSS, except for the parts that make money. No big tech CEO is wringing their hands thinking of ways to end freedom once and for all. They just don't care if whatever they do doesn't work on Linux.
Companies like Disney are happy to block any Linux computer already with the standards we have. Not because they hate freedom, but because they don't care their DRM doesn't work.
Attested passkeys, on the other hand, are a massive pain. You'd need to get a list of all the keys for all the normal trusted parties (Google/Microsoft, Apple doesn't even support it, Yubikey, and so on) and keep that list up to date. The moment a model of Yubikey gets a firmware bug published, all keys signed by all Yubikeys of that firmware need to be retracted (and all users locked out) or attestation is meaningless. They're way too much work outside of the space they're actually useful: managed hardware for employees, where the user has already given up any control anyway.
TOTP is not an alternative for passkeys. It's trivial to phish and it does get phished all the time. The only comparable authentication mechanism is client certificates/mTLS, which has been tried and dismissed long ago.
Never really cared enough to actually look deep into it to this was a good read. Appreciated.
I am a big Passkey advocate, but like many things these days - as pointed out here - they are a double-edged sword that have been very effectively "poisoned" by the same groups responsible for much of the recent DRM-ification of a lot of web tech.
A close parallel of this is the EU's efforts to build "digitally sovereign" software but ending up increasing reliance on Apple & Google in the process[0].
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
There's also the fact that passkey storage is currently shit. Even the most expensive yubikeys can only store 100 passkeys. I currently have 700+ entries in my password store, and that's excluding the business stuff. Am I supposed to faf about with 8 yubikeys? Somehow labelling them so I know which 100 passkeys each one contains?
That's strange, since neither of them are a big player in the attestation enabled key manufacturer market. AFAIK Apple doesn't even make keys, and barely anyone uses Google's keys. You even mention Yubikey, yet somehow think Google and Apple have a duopoly here.
The equivalent of 'owner override' is user access to all secrets.
As with TC, one could have all the user-protecting aspects without any of the user-limiting aspects, by implementing suitable owner override / by enabling users to know all secrets.
Do you think they did that to keep us FOSS neckbeard hackers happy?
Apple is perfectly fine with taking control of your privacy if they're the ones in control, and in this case they would have to put third parties in control instead. I'm sure they'd much rather take control themselves and build these types of checks into their "Sign in with Apple ID" buttons instead, so they can put "if you want Human Proven Secure Attested devices (invented by Apple), let your users sign in with Apple ID" on their website.
This (before they go on to describe actual passkeys) sounds like object capabilities to me. Capabilities combine designation and authorization so if you don't have it, you can't use it. It's the type of security that we should be moving to.
Passkey attestation sounds like a nightmare for user privacy and for anyone that doesn't use a major corporate operating system.
I'm not looking forward to when passkeys become even more forced upon us and you have to carry around multiple devices by different manufacturers because platform A and B don't support the same devices.
See e.g. https://community.openai.com/t/daybreak-does-not-recognize-t...
I don't have the choice to use a bank card online without 2FA - it's mandated. I can either use one of the options provided or I will go to my bank in person and close my account. Those are the possibilities. Nothing else.
Passkeys are only one kind of 2FA.
Yes, banks are particularly bad at this because their threat model is strong.
My bank required installing an authenticator, but apparently recently they've allowed SMS based 2FA. It seems users complained/resisted and they had to accommodate them. Maybe you should give feedback to your bank. Be the uncompromising minority.
I think 2FA is fine and a good idea, but I agree with the author that passkeys seem fraught as designed.
Many would actually rather you close their account with them than them making the tiniest compromise or offering any alternative to their SOP at all. That SOP strongly assumes things like “all customers have a mobile phone plan with the big three carriers”, “all customers own property or at least have car insurance” (that’s already their authentication fallback flow!) etc.
I have also faced this issue with banks and their frustrating authentication issues. Not to mention proprietary app requirements.
A good description of the design principles behind passkeys, actually.
> They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.
Nope, that's attestation in general; passkeys are not required for that. Passkeys have nothing to do with secure boot, for example. Which version of manifest and adblock chrome/edge supports also has nothing to do with their passkey support. Nor does the possible mandatory age-verification flag we might soon get built into our phones: it'll definitely use some kind of crypto but that can still be one in other ways than with passkeys.
Passkeys are a kludge for many reasons, but let's be careful with our terminology.
The expression was wrong, but the real meaning was described further in the post. The author meant that sites with passkeys can render unapproved software useless, in contrast to TOTP where any client is compatible.
me: Can you show me my stuff?
website: HTTP 401, who are you? I understand EasyAuth 1.0, if that is good for you.
me: Sure, here's my EasyAuth 1.0: Hi <website>, I'm <user_id>. The time is <timestamp>. Signed, <digital_signature>.
2. The complexity in the standard is there to ensure things are done securely (think: not doing password checking via comparison loop).
3. The unnecessarily complexity in individual implementations in websites and passkey stores is due to general baseline corporate "incompetence".
If you use webauthn, you're already using passkeys.
So no one implements it for site-local login. Even the biggest sites like Amazon, for example, still use old-school passwords+2FA.
The way secure auth works for small sites is that a third party[1] authenticates you, who the website trusts more than mere users. And that's where all the complexity comes up. You need something secure stored on your known-secure device, a password alone won't do.
[1] In practice Google or Meta. Occasionally Apple or Microsoft. Everyone else is noise.
I guess I am envisioning the user agent doing all of this. You go to a site and create click account, your browser shows a pop-up: "<website> is asking you create an EasyAuth account. Would you like to create an account on this site?" If you click yes, then the user agent does this in the background:
website: Sure you can have an account. Use this token <token> once and this ID <user_id> forever.
me: Ok, here's your token <token> for ID <user_id> and my public key is <public_key>. Signed, <digital_signature> to prove it works on my end.
Maybe generating a unique public key for each website is not substantially better than generating a password, but at least a signature cannot get stolen on the server side or in transit. You wouldn't have to change your public key if their database got slurped.
Passwords also aren't standardized, so they are pain to generate (special characters required or disallowed?). They don't reliably autofill into a website. You still have to go through a manual flow to login; user-agent doesn't just keep you logged in. I guess I would be fine if the user-agent knew how to authenticate me to every website.
Maybe this is what the passkey system was before it got designed-by-committee'd into oblivion. I am just always amazed by how complex authentication is when the user-agent should be able to handle this rather painlessly.
That's literally what a passkey is, that the linked article argues against. It relies on the platform vendor of your device hardware to validate the full stack of software. You can't just do it in a browser because anything that reads the browsers data (or attaches a debugger, or runs the browser in an instrumented VM, etc...) can exfiltrate the key.
While that is an option, I've been using passkeys on Amazon since 2023.
Attestations were added so that highly specific domains where attestation is required (by law, a regulator etc.) can still use the same passkey spec as everyone else without having to invent their own thing.
If there was benefit to BigTech of locking in Auth to a specific device, they'd have done it long ago - it's not difficult.
Lots of places where you might have specific requirements about your authenticating users. E.g. to achieve FIPS compliance, or if your user population is low-single-digits because it's critical national infrastructure.
> I want them to all have to invent their own, so that most of them will make mistakes that let the attestation be bypassed and freedom be restored.
I most definitely do not want operators of CNI to be "inventing their own" that can trivially allow compromise or weakness. "User freedom" is not the prevailing value in a lot of authentication contexts.
https://cphpost.dk/2026-10-10/news/round-up/123456-password-...
I have sign up a few for "get a feel" of what is going on.
but the implementation outside a few flagship website just sucks. It is infested with the "design by committee" disease -- too many options, almost impossible to implement correctly.
And conversely, there are also many ways to make legacy password based auth break password managers and annoy users even though there’s no specification for that at all.
I don't trust using anything else that I can't backup myself, remote attestation is trash.
Look at "the war on general-purpose computing" for a good perspective.
But, instead, we end up with 1 passkey per device (potentially per web browser) per website -- and some websites do not allow any other kind of auth. If you lose that phone, or wipe it, move on, or it is compromised, now you can't login to your account anymore?
There is literally no reason for all of this nonsense.
Websites should be providing a challenge, your device should produce a tweaked key based on the domain, sign the challenge, and that should be it. You have one root key per device.
A standard API to register new passkeys for new devices.
Require two factors Password + passkey, or two passkeys.
No transferring private keys between devices.
Requiring 2 factors per website per user, potentially per device, is far more complexity than most people are capable of dealing with.
And I really do not like that my phone# and email# are now de-facto second factors on everything.
Especially this line: "I believe this was done in order to deliberately confuse users and encourage them not to look too closely at the fine text." Don't attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to incompetence
A lot of people have said there are pros and cons to any authentication method. Pass keys have drawbacks but they also for a lot of advantages.
TOTP has a fatal flaw: it relies on the human to not paste the number into a phishing website. You can do a lot of bank transfers or whatever, in seconds, with a valid session derived from a phished TOTP.
Characterizing it as a sticky note on the desk is extremely dishonest.
I stopped reading after that. Obviously this guy doesn’t know what he is talking about or why that sms and otp are just worthless more or less if you care about security. They are actually loopholes in security. If you can use passkeys you would want to make sure that your stupid service provider(I.e Google, bank etc) is not being stupid to fallback to otp or sms crap.
Second, I think the article is really silly. If they are concerned that eventually service providers might restrict passkey authentication to authorized passkey providers, what prevents them from disabling password/TOTP authentication? That’s just silly. I’ll use passkeys while they are convenient. If service providers start disallowing my passkey provider, I’ll either switch to password/TOTP if that’s possible or just stop using the service whatsoever. What’s the big deal?
If they will be popular, and made inconvenient, you could be forced to use them. Like 2FA in corporate environments; it's forced and you can't do anything else than to put a code every time you login somewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753211
I don't like passkeys (hawksley.dev)
853 points by ethanhawksley 23 days ago | 832 comments
If you write a long article about the merit of passkeys and there is no occurrence of the string "phish" in your article, I am afraid I cannot take your rant seriously.
Again, this stuff is not merely theoretical. YubiKeys have been a thing at Google and other major tech companies for almost two decades now and the effects are well-studied.
[1]: I have found for some weird reason, this is often overlooked and misunderstood in the industry. People even know about SIM swaps and stuff like that, but don't realize OTP is not phishing-proof.
Yubikeys are a great second factor honestly. But do you want to use a Yubikey as a passkey? Sorry you are likely dissatisfied. Many websites and apps (especially apps) support passkeys but would prohibit using your Yubikey as a passkey.
Bullshit. Literally number one attack vector.
> Password managers are also checking the domain before supplying a saved password.
Password managers are not anywhere as ubiquitously used as you'd think. Even if you rely on password managers, you encounter scenarios where the website relies on a different domain that's not paired appropriately. Some "legitimate" mofos like Plaid used to ask password for third party website. Consumers don't see a password manager failure to fill out a password as a security issue. They see it as a routine password manager failure.
That’s an out-of-date view. The number one attack vector these days is cookie stealing. The prevalence of 2FA even weak ones like SMS-based 2FA has made plain old phishing so much less effective.
What you may be confusing with is the number of incidents involving token theft, which is often facilitated by phishing.
No, fuck that. Just let me use an SSH cert at that point. The existence of phishing is a comparatively minor evil.
Sharing and phishing are on two different axes. You can have shareable credentials that are phishing-resistant when used.
You can have hardware-backed SSH keys that are not cloneable. You would need the browser to prevent phishing while still using SSH agent as its underlying signature mechanism (implied by my "in a consumer package").
Once, I lost the master password of my password manager and the email to reset that master password was sent to my email inbox which required a password which was stored in my password manager which I was trying to regain access to... Catch 22... In the end, I got lucky that I didn't trust the entire security model and I had written down the password for my email on a sticky note on my desk!
The reason I lost the master password is because my company made me change the password every few months and didn't let me reuse old passwords and forced me to use a specific sequence of special characters. Eventually I couldn't remember which of the last 10 passwords I used was the latest one and which special characters were not allowed for which environment.
Epic for example has at least 3 different ways to load the pass key e.g. username first, passkey first, username + password, then passkey. Luckily their app lets you in with Passkeys alone
Walmart prompts for username first, then passkey, then it sends you a verification code to your email address.
The issue is that every site has a random flow of username, password, oauth (then a few oauth screens), passkey, 2fa and so on.
Authentication has become absurd. None of this is making people safer. If sites are seeing less fraud reports, it's likely they are harder to detect rather than less frequent.
I still really like fido U2F. They are (relatively) obvious; they are (relatively) open - there are many third parties that support it; they can be done shareable (I know Trezor - which is mainly a crypto wallet - can be used as U2F with the same "seed" that you can share); it's much more simple to grasp. They also solve the phishing issue effectively.
I can't really grasp what Passkeys are.
Various dimensions (copyable vs non-copyable, transferable vs. non-transferable, hardware bound vs. software only, attestation vs. non-attestation) are presented as if they all exist as distinct specification or implementation properties, yet at least half of these don't, at a first glance.
"User-Present vs Non-User-Present passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": Nope, all WebAuthN credentials require user presence verification:
> requireUserPresence
> The constant Boolean value true. It is included here as a pseudo-parameter to simplify applying this abstract authenticator model to implementations that may wish to make a test of user presence optional although WebAuthn does not.
"Transferable vs Non-Transferable passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": There's no such property in WebAuthN or FIDO. Passkey implementations may or may not implement the optional password manager migration flow, but the website has nothing to do with that.
"Hardware-Backed vs Software-Backed passkeys [...] Both kinds exist.": Also no, or rather, this point is redundant with "Attested vs Non-Attested passkeys": A non-attested passkey can tell you what it wants about being hardware backed, so they're effectively the same property. The same applies to "Copyable vs Non-Copyable passkeys [...] Both kinds exist."
So let's unpack this statement:
"This means Twitter (formally X) can say to you, “sorry, we only accept the User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed varieties of passkey here."
User-present: redundant, as all passkeys are.
User-verified: This part is true. Sites can choose to demand this, make it optional, or discourage it. Quite reasonable, given that the optimal value probably depends on whether there's also a password being entered, i.e. whether the passkey is supposed to be a single factor (possession of/access to some device) or two factors (being able to authenticate to that device biometrically or using a knowledge factor, usually).
Non-copyable/hardware-backed: Realistically, a site won't be able to make you use attestation, as that would mean excluding the by far most popular implementations in the wild, i.e. Android and iOS's native solutions. By extension, they can't enforce anything about copyability either (or to be precise, nothing they can't already with user agent sniffing and device fingerprinting).
So what's left? Websites can effectively decide whether to require/use passkeys for two factor or single factor authentication. Doesn't sound as scary to me anymore.
All in all, the article makes a few valid points, but arrives at them via heavy handwaving and a lot of motivated reasoning to back it up. This article could have been 70% shorter and would have probably made a stronger or at least equally strong and more accurate point. Generally, I really do agree that there are many possibilities for user-hostile traps in WebAuthN, but if we want to successfully navigate them, critics need to step up their epistemology. The specs are really byzantine and confusing enough.
Especially if you have devices from different vendors, such as an Android phone and a Mac computer.
I think passkeys are just an additional form of vendor lock-in.
So TOTP only targets the situation that user account is compromised. It doesn't help you if the server gets compromised.
Yes, they have some window dressing and opt-in features that extend the basic concept of asymmetric key pairs. Attestation is only in the spec to appease some large enterprise users for very specific scenarios. Signature counters are in there too, but since Apple decided not to implement (which I’m fine with), they are essentially irrelevant in the general case.
In practice, Passkeys are really quite simple.
We can do this, people. We can move beyond the era where poorly protected password databases are handed around like candy.
This is less secure than pure username+password in principle because it gives an impression of greater security while actually delivering the important secret in plaintext. This can cause platforms to enable the higher trust features, or have additional confidence that someone is not an attacker, even when either one would be highly inappropriate.
TOTP does not have this problem since the secret is enrolled once by the account owner and then never communicated again, especially never helpfully to an attacker right when they need it.
> One use case is particularly intriguing to me. In principle, remote attestation can also be run in reverse, to verify that the server you connect to is not doing anything you don’t want it to be doing (such as stealing your credit card number, or keeping backups of the posts you delete). Sadly, to my knowledge, no major platform has ever implemented “reverse” remote attestation this way.
This is only possible if you've audited the code in order to approve it. In practice, this requires auditing the entire SBOM, manually, yourself, for every single platform release. Or deferring to someone else to do it. I expect this will never happen.
lol. lmao even
Use proper password managers, like keepassxc. Then you have control. But problem is that not all sites support that. If you can't use the above - then yes, passkeys are bad, especially if they become mandatory.
- Never underestimate the effectiveness of school yard persuasion.
> What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys
Passkeys are _by_ _design_ representable as clear-text strings. You can export them and sync between devices. I'm using BitWarden with a self-hosted Vaultwarden for the server-side to do that, for example.
That's not the intention of the relevant standards.[1]
[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
Sigh. IT LITERALLY IS.
The name "passkeys" itself means "exportable keys":
https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/
> When a user creates a passkey on any of their devices, it gets synced to all the user’s other devices using the same passkey provider that is also signed into the same user’s account. Thus, passkeys created on one device become available on all devices. > Notably, if the user gets a new device and sets it up with their passkey provider, the user’s passkeys are synced and available for sign-in on the new device.
The resident keys (the ones created by platform-specific TPMs) are not passkeys. And they had been standardized _before_ the passkeys.
> The name "passkeys" itself means "exportable keys":
> https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/
This does not follow from my understanding of the word, and the words 'export' and 'exportable' don't appear on the page you've linked. Nor did I see anything indicating that was a core part of their design from a cursory reading of the page, although I might have missed something. Your quote certainly doesn't imply 'exportable'.
Syncable? Yes. Exportable? Yes. Clear text? Sure, behind the scenes. Exportable as clear text? Yes, but not intended. To quote Tim Cappalli, who's credited on the W3C spec as an editor[1] and maintains passkeys.dev,[2] so presumably knows what he's talking about: "Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text."[3]
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/
[2] https://passkeys.dev/about/
[3] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
I literally provided a citation.
> Syncable? Yes. Exportable? Yes. Clear text? Sure, behind the scenes. Exportable as clear text? Yes, but not intended.
A syncable credential is by necessity representable in clear text at some point. In comparison, resident WebAuthn private keys NEVER leave the secure device.
> [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/
WebAuthn is a _superset_ of Passkeys. Here's the citation from your own linked page:
> This use case illustrates how a consumer-centric Relying Party can leverage the authenticator built-in to a user’s devices to provide phishing-resistant sign in using multi-device credentials (commonly referred to as synced passkeys). ... > A backup eligible public key credential source is referred to as a multi-device credential whereas one that is not backup eligible is referred to as a single-device credential. See also § 6.1.3 Credential Backup State.
That I said does not support your statement.
> A syncable credential is by necessity representable in clear text at some point.
I never said this was wrong.
> WebAuthn is a _superset_ of Passkeys
I don't see how your quote illustrates this, and I've only heard them referred to as the same thing. Would you care to elaborate? And maybe provide an example?
> multi-device credentials (commonly referred to as synced passkeys).
> A backup eligible public key credential source is referred to as a multi-device credential whereas one that is not backup eligible is referred to as a single-device credential.
The previous name for single-device credentials was "resident keys".
So yes, providing a way to export and back up the Passkeys was _literally_ the intention of the WebAuthn authors from the beginning. The ability to export and sync passkeys was not a temporary accident, it has always been intended functionality.
None of us had a say in our existence itself. Skin color. If we cannot have a say over our provenance itself "ultimate control" is just an empty phrase.
Their concerns about big corp might hold some meager merit but "beware the avarice of rich people who view you as a sheep in their flock whether you want it or not" isn't really new.
The point is very simple - there was once a day when we had considerably more control over the way we use computers and the networks that connect them. That is slowly being taken away, piece by piece, until the only path to use them is to 'consent' to whatever demands the corporations put up. Not that this doesn't exist already, but today will seem like the wild west in comparison to what's coming.
"Big tech is coercive and evil" isn't a new view, but "passkeys are one of their tools and not just some agnostic technology-first nerd solution" is still not widely known.
And our agreement doesn't stop there. No views I encounter anymore at my near ripe old age of 50 are new anymore
Social conservatism whittles viable value statements down to a finite subset of cause-effect. And I don't mean just flag waving holy book social conservatism. This community is clinging hard to social tropes the other 8 billion are moving on from
Run a trend analysis on the comments of HN going back decades whole lot of repetitive gab about state management in a machine; chef or bash or llms... same old ground truth; don't speak too far outside the experience of readers or the inherent short term prediction engine in their brain will segfault from a biological memory overflow
Religious people are not the only ones who live in rhetorical fantasy
End of day the provenance of any socialized idea is some rando I have no obligation to march in lockstep with; physically or philosophically