Passkeys: don’t stop them Passkeys: don’t, stop them
What a shitshow
Meanwhile, half of the people at every company I’ve ever worked at:
If the computer is in even a marginally secure place, storing passwords on physical paper is better than what a lot of people do.
Of all the proverbial bullets I’ve been hit with, none had my name on them; they were all addressed “To whom it may concern”. The times my identity has been stolen or my accounts compromised it was because somebody attacked some fairly large entity, like Alphabet or Equifax or Microsoft or Visa. Nobody’s going to walk into my house looking for my passwords. They might walk into my house looking for my television, but that hasn’t happened to this house longer than I’ve been alive.
Yep, there’s a reason 2FA recovery keys are usually printed and stored safely.
With that said, one way to avoid someone compromising service A due to somebody breaking into service B is to have different passwords everywhere, so a Password Manager is more convenient anyway.
Which is why I use a password manager. There are some passwords that I do keep human readable and typeable, like my home wi-fi password, because…enter a password like ghQ953mGh0hY0eo5vgnj;lse%tp[n9a36 into my niece’s Switch Lite when she comes to visit. For that I do the CorrectHorseBatteryStaple thing. But for most passwords for services that aren’t in my physical control I use my PM’s random string generator.
For home Wi-Fi I use a strong password, but that’s because it’s something I input once in a blue moon. For guests I have a guest Wi-Fi with a simpler* (still reasonably secure and random, but shorter and without special characters) password and a QR code for simple use, though they are rate limited and have no access to any other network clients.
The worst part of the left one is the implication they have only two passwords. The “under the keyboard” part at least requires physical access and (hopefully) means its not something stupid or short like “p@ssw0rd”.
This is why passphrases are better than passwords. So the “Under the keyboard” can be used as password. It has 3 out of the 4 types to match complexity and plentiful for length. And so much easier ro remember. It could be also a quote from your favorite movie or book, part of a lyric of your favorite song, etc.
The “under the keyboard” part at least requires physical access
That’s fine at home. Not so great in an office, though
I agree, but if I had to choose between someone reusing passwords and someone who kept them under the keyboard I’d probably choose the latter
You can’t fit that many post-it notes under the keyboard though, so if they’re doing the latter they’re probably doing the former
I have yet to see a sticky note password that was anywhere near NIST compliant lol.
Oct0ber2026!
The biggest problem I see is that it requires OS or browser integration. While possibly a better solution than simple passwords this feels like a vendor lock-in scheme.
You don’t remember them you are not expected to moving from iOS to Android lets say generate new ones for your new device.
Passkeys are greate as long you make sure you use a third party (partial) password app, like proton or bitwarden that works everywhere.
This right here. KeepassXC (PC) already had passkey support for a while, KeepassDX (Android) recently implemented support. If you use FOSS implementations, vendor lock-in and potential future corporate enshittification are non-issues.
Until they only allow specific AAGUIDs to enroll passkeys that don’t include the one used by KeePassXC (
fdb141b2-5d84-443e-8a35-4698c205a502) or KeePassDX (eaecdef2-1c31-5634-8639-f1cbd9c00a08) because they don’t consider them secure enough.vendor lock-in and potential future corporate enshittification are non-issues.
For now.
In some countries, banks require users use their app on IOS or Google’d Android. You can’t use their services via browser, LineageOS, GrapheneOS
In some countries, banks require users use their app on IOS or Google’d Android. You can’t use their services via browser, LineageOS, GrapheneOS
True. I’m kind of affected by this in GOS, although I found a workaround to bludgeon my banking app into submission.
Still, this is an issue that is already here, and it exists independently of passkeys.
Then you’re screwed anyway
Fuck off with that defeatist bullshit.
Make them drag you ckicking and screaming. Only morons and cowards walk in lock-step with the corpos
Then don’t use these websites and this is a non issue
Ah, but of course! Why didn’t I think of closing my bank account?
They really aren’t a trap. They’re a well designed standard. The tooling around them isn’t quite perfect yet, but they’re a huge improvement over passwords.
People upvote because they hate change.
I’ve honestly not seen any benefits over passwords.
If I want to check my mail on a library computer, I can type in a password and I’m in. If it’s using passkeys I need an already logged-in smartphone - which I probably don’t have if I need that library computer in the first place. That’s just one example.
Personally I like Passkeys, and I enroll them in both my KeePassXC vault and on my two hardware keys (a primary Yubikey which I carry with me and a spare one at home).
It doesn’t absolve one from neglecting proper security best practices (don’t login on a system you don’t trust, logout / clear cookies when done, etc), but a Passkey on a hardware key is much more difficult to phish or extract if you’re using someone else’s computer.
Well if your using a pasword manger instead of easily remmbered passwords your screwed either way. And considering the fast majority of people use the same password eveywhere and use a simple passowrd they are a big improvement.
Memorizing passwords doesn’t scale well.
You’ve likely got dozens of accounts. You’re not going to memorize a password for every account. Re-using passwords is a serious security problem though. Poorly secured sites get their password databases leaked all the time. If you use the same password on lots of sites, it’s basically a sure thing that the hashes are out there on the darkweb already along with your email, and your password is compromised.
Also, typing your email password into an unsecured library computer is a terrible idea. It is ridiculously easy for someone to install a keylogger and gather emails and passwords. In the past, your main protection was that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to break into the computers, install keyloggers, collect lists of passwords, then figure out how to use them to get money. But with LLMs that can all be automated. It has become ridiculously cheap, and can be done by someone with a bot farm in Russia.
A password manager largely fixes the first problem, but at that point you need a device with your password manager with you to log in anyway. And the password manager doesn’t fix the second problem at all.
I only dislike the ability for service providers to enforce a “security level”. Those should be the exclusively under my (the user) control. Sending preferred default (hints) would be cool, but not enforcement.
That a webpage can basically prevent me from using a passkey if the passkey is stored in software (a password manager for example) is complete bullshit. Especially if there is still username/password as alternative which is clearly worse. Sure, hardware tokens are the ultimate security. But it should be up to me and not them if I want that level of security.
But they already do enforce a “security level” for passwords through minimum character counts (e.g. must be at least 8 characters long), specific character requirements (e.g. at least one upper case + lower case + number), rotation schedules (e.g. must be changed every 90 days), etc. Some even enforce password sharing (e.g. Netflix IP/geolocation checks).
Yeah and certain password requirements are also dumb. But at least they still give me a degree of freedom how to generate the password and how I store the password.
Second factor is sometimes worse than Passkeys; with vendor specific apps (Steam Guard, Blizzard Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, etc) instead of following standard TOTP. But still. I want agency over my credentials.
I would say the people hate it, because they are exposed to the tooling and not the standard.
The standard might be the best there is, if the tooling is shit people won’t use it. And once you’ve been exposed to bad tools you make the connection between tools bad = passkey bad because they don’t know there’s a difference…
Admittedly I didn’t read that one guy’s blog post very closely, but it seemed to claim that because some companies may some day misuse/abuse some features of passkeys, passkeys are poison and no one should ever use them.
It’s a very basic principle, that you don’t create powers that could be abused. That they haven’t been abused yet does not make doing so ok. It like saying it’s ok that my government was given the power to lock people up with no reason or due process because they haven’t used it yet.
Another point someone brought up in one of these posts: the remote attestation (IE locking your passkeyto a specific app or software) issue is highly unlikely to be used for public websites, because it would block / halt the adoption they’re trying to promote, and its against their interest. No website that I know of has done this for TOTP either.
They push TOTP and passkeys now because they want to avoid the costs and support around resolving hijacked accounts, and password phishers.
The use-case for remote attestation is a valid one also: say you have a really secure internal system that you want to lock down to only users of your specific passkey validator, and make sure its that specific app, unspoofed.
Brought to you by the community sending death threats to a guy that added a date field in a program
Who did what now?
The developer who added a “date of birth” field to systemd received death threats, because some people saw it as a first step towards age verification and apparently the appropriate response to that is cyber bullying and death threats
I have a password manager and hardware token. I see no need to use passkeys.
Password manager can store passkeys as well. They’re way easier to fill than passwords, they always work and never have issues with filling like you can have on some websites that just don’t work well with pw managers.
Yubikey4lyfe
But you need to buy at least two of them, which isn’t cheap.
And… honestly, you should probably buy 3. Losing your main key only to find out that your backup key broke a month ago and you haven’t been testing it is a real risk.
Not every service allow for registering more than one passkey
And what are they odds of simultaneous losing / breakdown of all three keys? I think they are not negligible.
I ended up getting one through arstechnica (they sent one if you subscribed back then), then I got more through some sale or something
Question: do English native speakers also read “arstechnica” as “arsetechnica”
I definitely read it like arse technica
are passkeys not a type of a hardware token? they’re tied to a device.
They’re actually not tied to a device. They can be synced across devices.
Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane, Google, Apple, and Microsoft will all do passkey syncing for you.
We don’t yet have a good Linux native passkey store. I believe the
credentialsdproject is working on a spec for that. Once that’s up and running I would expect to see some options for syncing without relying on a third party service (though, you can self-host bitwarden right now). It’s definitely not seamless on Linux yet though.Sadly 4 of those companies are American, and Dashlane has significant US operation presence, making those recommendations unacceptable to me - ymmv
1password is Canadian and zero-knowledge so could be an option if i didnt already use a different service.
I dont like the idea of pre-authorising a device to handle credentials and access in perpetuity at the hardware level. I’d be fine with having a hardware key that holds passkeys but cant use them, while the device using them can only do so when i put the two items together. Unfortunately i do not understand how to save a passkey to a hardware key or how to manage them once that is done. Till someone gives me a straightforward ux to do that, i’ll be using unique passwords, a manager, and totp.
If i am misunderstanding, thats just a different problem; the passkey thing needs to be explained more clearly.
Microsoft makes a hard distinction between Device-Bound and Synced passkeys inside of corporate tenants. They are in fact two different things that happen to be using the same FIDO standard, and can be stored alongside one another in the same app if it supports it.
Also KeePassXC with the browser plugins works a treat for synced passkeys.
so whats a passkey and how is it different from a password?
A passkey is cryptographically signed by the server when it’s created.
So it does not only has your credentials encrypted which are then used to login to a server, but it also carries information about the server and only that server can request the credentials from the passkey. So unlike a password a passkey is resistent to phishing attempts as you can’t actually give your credentials away to anyone but the actual server it was created for.
the duality of passkeys
No duality: only suck
It’s the typical case of perfect being the enemy of good.
Seems like if you want something to be able to be unlocked, you’ll need a key.
Again with this?
I’m going to do the smart thing, get drunk and pass that key to a designated driver and let him figure it out.Last time I was in Thailand and my buddy told me don’t worry, she’s not a trap.
Passkeys… how to make the public still not understand mutual TLS…