Passkeys and Modern Authentication

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/2/passkeys/

by Bogdanp • 11 months ago

187 204 11 months ago

lucumr.pocoo.org

bmandale• 11 months ago

An attempt by an open source password manager to provide export of private keys was ruled insecure and should not be supported.

The name of the issue reveals the actual problem: "should never be exported in clear text". If the export was encrypted with a passphrase in a standard format, then there would be no issue. It's specifically doing it in plain text that causes consternation. Of course, in practice it doesn't make much of a difference when users are incapable of choosing secure passwords, let alone passphrases. But requiring exports to be encrypted is the least one can do to maintain a degree of security while still allowing exports.

For many years already, people lose access to their Google account every day and can never regain it. Google is well known for terminating accounts without stating any reasons. With that comes the loss of access to your data. In this case, you also lose your credentials for third-party websites.

In practice this is frequently already true. Many sites require an email to sign up. Whenever you attempt to log in on a new device, they require you to type in a code sent to your email. Without access to your email, you cannot sign in.

tuckerman8• 11 months ago

Where is the line exactly though? If the password manager put up a big red notice when trying to export in plain text is that enough? If not, why not?

I am sympathetic to the intent but the words of Patrick Henry come to mind too often in conversations like these. I love passkeys and appreciate secure defaults but I feel strongly that user freedom is a more fundamental requirement than preventing phishing attacks.

AndrewDucker• 11 months ago

Because many end users will ignore that. And this technology is set up to prevent end users from hurting themselves, even if that constrains technologically capable ones.

AlotOfReading3• 11 months ago

    But requiring exports to be encrypted is the least one can do to maintain a degree of security while still allowing exports.

Why is the protocol dictating the user's security model? I can see why particular applications wouldn't choose to support insecure exports (and would even agree with that), but I genuinely don't understand why the protocol is dictating that an application can't allow users the freedom to choose their own security model. The same issue exists with HSTS, which I've found infuriating when the system is obviously wrong and I have to resort to absurd workarounds as a user because the application is handicapped from giving me an "ignore this" button.

Moreover, "just" password protecting a file isn't allowed by the draft CXP standard (https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxp-v1.0-wd-20241003.html#...), you have to use a HPKE scheme where the key exchange is manually orchestrated by the user to export offline. I get it from a security perspective, but that's stupid.

tadfisher7• 11 months ago

The other side of this is the Relying Party, a.k.a. the website operator that is relying on the user's password manager to be decently secure and resistant to phishing. Otherwise, why ditch passwords plus 2FA?

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

The spec participant here is also saying that encrypting your export file is a "temporary minimum". Personally, I think that requiring a passphrase for some standard symmetric encryption on the export is fine. Plenty of free and privacy-preserving apps I use (Signal, Aegis) do this. The real issue is that there is no guarantee over the medium term that even this will continue to be allowed.

AnotherGoodName• 11 months ago

there is effectively no way to export private keys between authentication password managers

No exporting really is a feature. Otherwise people would be tricked into giving away passkeys much like they are with passwords today.

You can always register multiple passkeys with providers though. Already have a passkey with google but want another one via a different password/account manager? Just go into settings on google and add it! This is effectively how you’re meant to move passkeys around. Create a new and register that with the same services as the old one.

The real hassle right now is remembering all the services you attached your current passkey to so you can register a new passkey with them and it’d be nice if there was something similar to ninite installer for passkey registration. But still it's not a huge blocker. You can absolutely use multiple passkeys and login with any one of them.

jazzyjackson4• 11 months ago

Just made the same comment, weird that its an unpopular opinion. Chalk it up to a UX issue around user expectations.

AlexandrB5• 11 months ago

It's not just that. There's a huge lack of trust with the tech industry. I don't think anyone trusts tech companies to act in the user's best interests with this kind of restriction instead of using it to drive more platform or service lock-in.

AlexandrB5• 11 months ago

Otherwise people would be tricked into giving away passkeys much like they are with passwords today.

Is this really a common attack vector vs. a company leaking their whole customer database and a bunch of password being revealed that way?

habinero2• 11 months ago

Yes, it's called phishing.

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

Not yet. It's a more complex variation on phishing, but not complex enough that it wouldn't happen if scammers needed it to.

recursive4• 11 months ago

I don't want to cede a chokepoint to my online identity to a multinational conglomerate with no support department. I don't understand the UX for adding more passkeys.

I'd rather have the possibility of being "tricked" than get locked into another walled garden. Maybe I'm wrong for feeling that way, but there are literally dozens of us.

hooverd2• 11 months ago

Effectively ceding control of your online identity is a feature? Would you be willing to bet real money that the passkey attestation feature will never be abused be these same companies ?

palata34• 11 months ago

How is that effectively ceding control of your online identity?

You can buy a security key (that does not have your name on it), have it generate a FIDO2 key and use it as a passkey. You can have 100 Yubikeys for 100 different websites if you want.

But you can't ever export the private key from the Yubikey, and that's a feature. That's the whole point of the Yubikey.

palata34• 11 months ago

I don't get the downvotes here.

I feel like people mix up the protocols and the implementations. Because one can share their passkeys with a Google password manager does not mean that they have to. Passkeys are just WebAuthn, which works on its own.

Since I'm getting downvoted as well: I am using passkeys with Yubikeys, without depending on any TooBigTech.

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

Because one can share their passkeys with a Google password manager does not mean that they have to.

The standard provides the means for the relying party to choose what password managers it will accept, so you may very well have to use the Google password manager.

ezfe2• 11 months ago

The Passwords app in macOS 26 and iOS 26 support exporting passkeys to other password managers.

skybrian2• 11 months ago

It’s been announced but there’s no release date yet, in case anyone is wondering why they don’t have it.

ezfe2• 11 months ago

The export/import function is present in the public beta

hbn• 11 months ago

iOS 26 and macOS 26 will likely be released this month or next.

alphazard6• 11 months ago

Unfortunately the tech community is full of people who pride themselves on being aware of and advocating for the latest standard put out by whatever company. That's how we end up with lots of complicated nonsense like most of what is sent in HTTP headers, or the contents of a TLS certificate.

On the topic of authentication, it's solved. SSH nailed it, any further complexity is strictly worse. Signing up is uploading a public key. Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel.

shreddit• 11 months ago

Unfortunately the tech community is full of people who pride themselves on speaking for everyone and telling everyone to stop having fun with new tech because their solution is the best. And the one only truth.

yomismoaqui• 11 months ago

All developers pass this magpie phase [1] and as you get older you start to see new things more critically.

I guess a desirable trait of seniority is to balance the urge to play with new toys vs the feeling that sometimes we are running in circles, repeating the same mistakes with different tech.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-magpie-developer/

skybrian2• 11 months ago

I’ll add that eventually it’s less about what I want and more about what would work for other people I know. Many of them aren’t very technical.

What do you need to do to keep family from (a) not getting locked out and (b) not getting phished?

palata34• 11 months ago

Are you trying to say that security keys are not a good thing? I love security keys, that's my one example of a good technology.

vbezhenar2• 11 months ago

ssh is terribly insecure with no way of checking server certificate fingerprint automatically. Web solved it decades ago with CA.

karmarepellent4• 11 months ago

This is incorrect. SSH certificates work just like x509 certificates in that regard. Also, with PubkeyAuthentication, there exist all kinds of ways to collect host keys before connecting to them for the first time and thus avoiding the trust-on-first-use problem. Especially in private networks where you control all the nodes.

rlpb2• 11 months ago

OpenSSH supports DNSSEC-published host key fingerprints.

karmarepellent4• 11 months ago

Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel.

I can see how SSH could be used for authentication on the web. And I have no doubt that it would be sound out-of-the-box. But I am not sure what you mean by your last sentence. Do you mean that authentication targets are gated and only reachable by establishing a tunnel via some kind of forwarding?

Aside from the wonderful possibilities that are offered by using port forwarding of some kind, you could also simply use OpenSSH's ForceCommand to let users authenticate via SSH and then return a short-lived token that can then be used to log into an application (or even a SSO service).

I guess no one uses SSH for authentication in this way because it is non-standard and kind of shuts out non-technical people.

alphazard6• 11 months ago

authentication targets are gated and only reachable by establishing a tunnel via some kind of forwarding?

No, it's just how you authenticate with signing keys. Given that a secure channel has been set up with ephemeral keys, you can sign a commitment to the channel (like the hash of the shared secret key) to prove who you are to the other party.

let users authenticate via SSH and then return a short-lived token that can then be used to log into an application (or even a SSO service)

This is exactly what I recommend. If everyone did this, then eventually then the browsers or 1password could support it.

manithree• 11 months ago

Not just non-technical people, but a lot of Windows developers I've worked with over the years can't seem to grasp the asymmetric key concept enough to use it for git (and then complain about git over over https).

Being in charge of the strength and security of your private key is something most people don't want to do, so we get multiple identities made "easy" by walled gardens getting popular in passkeys.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

Signing up is uploading a public key. Signing in is cryptographically signing a commitment to the current ephemeral tunnel.

How do I sign in from multiple computers?

karmarepellent4• 11 months ago

A service that lets you sign up by uploading a SSH public key could just as well let you upload multiple public keys in your profile to be able to connect from other devices.

alphazard6• 11 months ago

There are multiple solutions to this, with tradeoffs. Doesn't change the fact that the service should only want a public key, and you should only give the service a public key. That's where this new complexity is being forced on users and developers. You need to be able to sign in, or let your users sign in, but you can choose how complicated of a key management strategy to have.

You can either have 1 key pair per service and sync them with something like 1password. Or you can have 1 key per service per device. Keys that never leave the device is usually considered more secure (and I agree for what I consider my threat model to be).

Important services like primary email, your bank, or cloud platform should probably do 1 key per device. Everything else benefits from the simplicity of 1 key per service with the keys synced.

agwa• 11 months ago

The simplicity of SSH's public key authentication comes with a significant privacy downside: https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/whoarethey https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/

This isn't such a big deal in the SSH ecosystem, but it would be a disaster on the Web where there is an enormous incentive to track users. Part of WebAuthn's complexity comes from addressing that.

alphazard6• 11 months ago

The complexity is unwarranted. The only thing that needs standardizing is how to hand over public keys (SSH format works fine), and what to sign to prove identity.

Everything else about managing which public keys are for what does not need to be decided in a standard. The users can choose whatever key management solution works best for them. What those links get at is a problem of key management. A single set of keys, where you send all of them to every server all the time, is a bad strategy.

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

Use a different public key for every site, specify which one in your .ssh/config. Only offer keys for the site(s) they correspond to. Done. This is already best practice, but could easily be improved by simple tools to manage it. You do not also need things like attestation and restriction of backups.

adiabatichottub4• 11 months ago

@alphazard, what are your thoughts on using self-signed X.509 certs, since 95% of the infrastructure is already there?

alphazard6• 11 months ago

I'm opposed to using certs where public keys will do. Certificates especially X.509 are more complicated than the public keys that they reference. They include things like domain names, serial numbers, version numbers, etc.

The complexity of X.509 belongs in the domain name system. If a bunch of large corporations want to come up with complicated formats so they can decide who gets to call themselves what on the internet, let them do that, but don't let them complicate basic security for the rest of us.

The experience to beat is swapping SSH keys. 95% of developers have setup access to a new machine using SSH. That should be the default experience for authenticating on the internet, and anything more complicated should be strictly opt-in.

palata34• 11 months ago

On the topic of authentication, it's solved. SSH nailed it, any further complexity is strictly worse.

Ever tried to SSH with a security key... through FIDO2? Or would you say that having your private key as a file on your computer is strictly better than having it in a security key? :-)

AnnualDegree99• 11 months ago

I use this very setup, it works great. Yubikey has supported resident keys for a while.

turtlebits• 11 months ago

"Solved" doesn't mean anything unless you have implementation/adoption.

palata34• 11 months ago

And it's just not true: ever wondered what those fingerprints are that nobody cares about and blindly goes for "yes" in SSH? The vast majority of SSH users would have no idea if they got MitM-ed.

WebAuthn helps prevent just that.

seany• 11 months ago

Exporting passkeys is the single required feature for me to start using them more. The "anti phishing" push has really gotten a little too crazy. It seems mostly related to our legal inability to push security responsibility onto consumers.

EbNar• 11 months ago

Exporting passkeys is the single required feature for me to start using them more.

Ditto

jazzyjackson4• 11 months ago

Given that you don't strictly need to have one passkey per site, is this desire to move passkeys around a holdover from wanting to "export" your passwords? Because if you can export them, an exploit can too. I find passkeys rather more interesting when they cannot be exported from a HSM / key enclave / yubikey, but of course I need to be able to register multiple yubikeys per site, and a few of my accounts didn't allow for this so I ended up using my yubikey for TOTP since I can have the same seed on multiple devices.

tuckerman8• 11 months ago

Export is a good check against lock in. I just went through my password manager and I have 60 passkeys. It would be a huge pain if I have to switch to a different password manager and there isn't export/import.

recursive4• 11 months ago

You should be allowed to keep your passkeys in such enclave. But there seems to be no alternative. I'm in the same boat as the GP. I'm not touching passkeys unless and until I can export them into a file I can get my grubby hands on. I'm guessing that's never happening. Not sure what one-passkey-per-site has to do with it.

mgulick• 11 months ago

My keepass database has around 400 different entries in it. If I needed to transfer to a new password manager, it's not feasible to go around to 400 different sites to register new passkeys. In case one might say the answer to that is oauth, I'm also not interested in putting my faith in Google/Microsoft/Apple being benevolent arbiters of my ability to access my accounts.

habinero2• 11 months ago

Nothing to do with legal responsibility and it's not about only consumers.

I have 50 terabytes of data breaches on a NAS with lots of plain text or badly encrypted passwords, and that's just a small subset of what's out there.

palata34• 11 months ago

There are two kinds of passkeys: the ones you can sync (i.e. export) and the ones you can't. The ones you can't sync are typically security keys, and there it's a feature.

So yeah, you can have whichever you want, nothing prevents it!

juancn• 11 months ago

    Signing into my accounts on my children’s devices has turned from a straightforward process to an incredibly frustrating experience. I find myself juggling all kinds of different apps and flows.

This strikes home for me, I'm the main gatekeeper of passwords and service accounts in my home. 2FA and passkeys are so annoying to juggle.

My kids use prepaid numbers, once I changed one and forgot to tell Apple, when I realized that I needed the old number later, it took me a month at least to get it back.

I really like passwords, the security risks are well known and really easy to handle compared to 2FA and all that crap, specially when 99% of your accounts are not sensitive enough to merit anything fancy.

toomuchtodo2• 11 months ago

Passwords are a weak authentication mechanism and incur liability. MFA is good, Passkeys are better. One time passwords via email are tolerable, still better than passwords.

(customer identity and access management is a component of my work at a fintech)

cuu5083• 11 months ago

Security-wise, passkeys are worse than username/password plus WebAuthn as the second factor.

OJFord• 11 months ago

Your fintech is probably not among the 99% accounts GP says don't warrant 'anything fancy'.

IME as a customer/user, financial institutions are some of the worst culprits for doing appalling things in the name of security (theatre) anyway.

1oooqooq3• 11 months ago

let me guess, until last years you had deployed a java applet keypad for users to log in? and today every time I can your recording offer to enroll in voice print?

yeah i will not be taking advice from the majority of people in Fintech on this topic. thank you.

adiabatichottub4• 11 months ago

It makes sense to keep printed backups of certain keys and passwords in a physically secure location, accessible to the people you trust in case of an emergency.

lixtra• 11 months ago

You might even split them so that k out of n trusted people are needed to restore them.

For example https://shamir.securitytools.io/

ajsnigrutin• 11 months ago

Passwords + OTP (stored in keepass or somewhere) is the win for me.

Everything else is a security theatre and an UX pain.

nixpulvis• 11 months ago

This is how I feel as well.

xeonmc• 11 months ago

I use my OTP secret as my account password, best of both worlds for portability!

anon70003• 11 months ago

Passkeys is not security theatre, and also not a UX pain if you use a password manager. Turns out it’s nice to have a standardized API for submitting a credential to a website rather than relying on browser extensions to hopefully guess the input field is for a password. (Not to mention the multitude of sites that don’t properly handle text being autofilled)

teekert• 11 months ago

I’m on proton (family) and put pass on all devices (inc the kids’) so I can quickly share credentials. But still, I agree that some kind of export of private keys is sorely needed.

basch2• 11 months ago

Ill maintain that family management of access control is one of the most broken things on the internet. Not only does 2fa make granting access on other devices a nightmare, but then each developer has its own version of parental controls.

ALL of account permissions, relations to other accounts, and authentication should be an exposed api that rolls up into a single dashboard. I should be able to go into one single control panel to control exactly what accounts are allowed to do what on what devices for all services for all family members. That includes lockouts, auth resets, push of auth to a device I dont have physical access to (kid is on a trip, I need to sign him into something).

I could go on and on and on about all the different ways this paradigm is so broken, it actually breaks our imagination of what it should look like in a functioning world. We are so used to doing it completely wrong, its hard to see right.

15155• 11 months ago

2FA and passkeys are so annoying to juggle.

Try 1Password Family and store your passkeys in there?

anon70003• 11 months ago

Agreed, my wife even says 1Password is one of the best tech things I’ve set up just because it completely solves sharing passwords and stuff with each other.

dan-robertson3• 11 months ago

Obviously, one could pay for an authenticator like 1Password, which at least is ecosystem independent. However, not everybody is in a situation where they can afford to pay for basic services like password managers

This argument was made in the context of moving out of the Apple ecosystem (are there other ecosystems one would want to leave where the only option is paying for something like 1password?). I don’t really buy it because I can’t work out a situation where one is switching from some expensive ecosystem but unable to pay a low fee for 1password. But maybe I’m missing an example.

Dr4kn• 11 months ago

There is also keepass, which you can sync with whatever free cloud storage you want. It might not be the nicest password manager you can use, but you can always use it for free.

Bitwardens free tier is also generous enough that a lot of people won't have to pay

dan-robertson3• 11 months ago

Seems like the existence of keypass does not support the argument made in the OP.

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

KeePassXC has been repeatedly threatened with blacklisting by the WebAuthn alliance. Once for allowing exports of passkeys, once for not requiring reauthentication of an already unlocked vault when providing a passkey.

the_mitsuhiko• 11 months ago

This argument was made in the context of moving out of the Apple ecosystem

Author here. Insert your favorite ecosystem in that people currently have. If you have a windows 11 computer you end up with Windows Hello passkeys for free. If you have a Chromebook then it will be something else.

Apple devices show up in low income households somewhat regularly where I live because of subsidized iPads for education.

kbelder• 11 months ago

I can’t work out a situation where one is switching from some expensive ecosystem but unable to pay a low fee for 1password.

You lose your job.

bradley13• 11 months ago

This. All of this. Passkeys are a great idea, but the walled gardens are a huge problem. Also, services placing additional requirements (e.g., attestations) that potentially violate your privacy and anonymity.

Just now, at least in Europe, there is a huge push to force users to authenticate themselves with their actual identity, even for ordinary Internet services. This is happening simultaneously in many countries (including non-EU countries like Switzerland). It almost has to be a coordinated effort....driven by whom? Passkeys play into this.

Call me paranoid...

unsnap_biceps2• 11 months ago

The walls are going to come down. KeyPassX supports passkeys and allows you to export them as you wish. 1Password and Apple Passwords have both said they're going to support exporting and importing of passkeys.

Yes, it's awful during the transition period while the tech matures, but there is a path towards a great future.

akazantsev2• 11 months ago

KeyPassX supports passkeys and allows you to export them as you wish.

The last time I tried to use passkeys, the desktop was easy. What about mobile? There wasn't a local third-party password manager that could work with passkeys on Android.

DavideNL• 11 months ago

…and do you think we can trust Big Tech on their promises, based on their reputation / recent news events?

varjolintu• 11 months ago

KeePassX is long dead, and it's not with "key" but with "kee" -> KeePassXC. Thank you :)

raxxorraxor3• 11 months ago

The "tech" of passkeys is trivial in context of authentication. You could argue that it is a UX issue. But I think you cut large companies, that have the ability to develop sensible UX a thousand times over, too much slack for a shitty product.

palata34• 11 months ago

Walled gardens are a huge problem, but they are orthogonal to passkeys. We have had walled gardens for a loooong time already. We should fight them, I agree.

But passkeys are just a way of democratising private keys instead of passwords.

Sure, there will be examples of walled gardens leveraging passkeys. But we have plenty of examples of walled gardens that don't need passkeys at all. It's a different problem.

1oooqooq3• 11 months ago

you're spot on. everyone here "keepassX works for me" are just frogs being slow boiled.

passkey are designed in a ways that the attestation party is visible. Tomorrow the coordinated effort will say "too much fraud from providers other than google and apple, sorry" (or something about protecting kids).

palata34• 11 months ago

passkey are designed in a ways that the attestation party is visible

Are you talking about the relying party? I don't think it works the way you describe...

dan-robertson3• 11 months ago

What do security professionals think about passkeys? In particular, those who were not involved in designing them. Lots of the arguments in this article feel very much like the sort of thing one would expect from someone into open source (not saying they are wrong, and I think they are well explained here) but I feel they will inevitably be the product of different concerns than those a security practitioner might have.

tptacek8• 11 months ago

Security people are generally pretty positive on Passkeys. Eliminating passwords has been the white whale of information security for over 3 decades. Practitioners are generally positive about FIDO2 (Yubikeys are fetish objects for them). I think message board people would probably be surprised at security practitioner attitudes towards Apple and Google authentication lock-in (locking my team into Google authentication would be one of my first moves at a new firm, and that's not an idiosyncrasy of mine so much as me doing what other CISO-types all say they do).

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

I think message board people would probably be surprised at security practitioner attitudes towards Apple and Google authentication lock-in

We're not surprised, but I think many of us are horrified. I think it's a culture clash, partly between Free Software and Enterprise communities, partly between developers and security professionals. Given that it's a culture clash, I don't actually see any resolution that will make everyone happy.

tadfisher7• 11 months ago

I helped implement support for passkeys in a banking product. They obviate so many attack vectors and adoption is high enough that it should be a requirement to at least support them.

We already require TOTP-based 2FA, and have even implemented secure TOTP via our mobile apps. Customers still do not understand 2FA and probably never will; we regularly have customers request 2FA resets after using their 10 backup codes. SMS- or email-based 2FA is a no-go.

We don't require hardware attestation, as that is the recommendation of the FIDO alliance and Google/Apple/Microsoft. It doesn't make sense to cut out iCloud/Google-synced passkeys given the clear security benefits over passwords+2FA.

Keep in mind that for our service, we regularly see attackers set up copycat sites to phish user credentials, and pay for Google Search ads to appear before our site in search results. These phishing attempts are sophisticated and customers will send their 2FA codes through them. _This is impossible with passkeys._

vaylian• 11 months ago

I think hardware keys are the best option for passkeys, because they have a separate (physical) user interface compared to software-based keys. This makes it easier to understand the login process. You physically interact with the hardware key to confirm that you want to log in. And you can use your key for many different accounts.

The downside is of course that hardware keys are typically not cheap and you should also buy a backup key. Another unnecessary downside is that certain companies like Microsoft require the use of resident keys, which take up storage space on the hardware key. The better alternative is non-resident keys, of which you can have an infinite number on your key.

arccy2• 11 months ago

Pretty much everyone likes them? Nobody likes passwords, especially passwords by users. Passkeys essentially force the users to have some sort of password manager, whether third party, or OS / browser integrated. Plus they're unphishable in normal use.

They're technically weaker than password + hardware key but stronger than anything else, including password + totp. Google Advanced Protection still wants you to have a hardware key for your account.

jesseendahl2• 11 months ago

Google's Advanced Protection Program supports both passkeys and security keys.

parliament322• 11 months ago

Compliance/security role at a company you've heard of here.

Passkeys are absolutely fantastic. Pretty much every complaint you see in these threads is seen as a positive in an enterprise context.

Attestation restricts passkey clients

GOOD. I need a way to prove passkeys live on hardware-backed crypto devices (see NIST SP 800-63B), attestation makes that possible.

But auth lock-in

GOOD. All our corporate sign-in events should be through our single IDP using SSO. Of course we want lock-in.

But I can't sign in to my children's devices

GOOD. An identity represents a entity, it should be impossible for you to pretend to be another entity, regardless of whether they're a child or dog or whatever. If you need "parental access" or similar to some accounts, contact your service provider and ask for that feature.

It's hard to export my passkeys

GOOD. Encrypted or not, a core security tenet is "a private key should never leave the device it was generated on" (hence the existence of HSMs, TPMs, etc). It should absolutely be impossible to ship your private keys around. Further, the primary appeal of passkeys in our context is phishing resistance, and it should be technologically impossible for a user to get bamboozled into exporting and sending their passkey to an adversary.

But I need my backups

Why? Just contact IT if you lose your credentials. If you're on the personal side and don't have an IT authority, you should just generate passkeys on multiple devices and add all of them to your accounts.

But that's a pain

Security is almost always inversely proportional to convenience.

NoGravitas15• 11 months ago

> But auth lock-in GOOD. All our corporate sign-in events should be through our single IDP using SSO. Of course we want lock-in.

My workplace uses Duo Mobile for a second factor, which is functionally identical to TOTP, and probably uses TOTP internally (if your android phone is rooted, you can export Duo Mobile keys to your choice of TOTP app). But as long as I'm being a good corporate citizen, I can't use my choice of TOTP app. What actual security (non-theater) interest does that serve?

jcmontx3• 11 months ago

One day Authy for desktop was deprecated and all of a sudden I was forced to always have my smartphone with me, which I was struggling to replace with a dumbphone. To this day, I have no way out of owning an smartphone for this very reason

psanford• 11 months ago

I assume you were using Authy desktop for TOTP? You don't need a smartphone for storing TOTP seeds or generating TOTP codes.

jcmontx3• 11 months ago

Indeed, but I have like 40 different cloud providers, social networks and SaaS' which would be a pain to migrate

cuu5083• 11 months ago

Are there many sites that only support Authy's push authentication and nothing else?

jcmontx3• 11 months ago

No, not really, it's about migrating/restoring every single 2FA key would be extremely inconvenient

y0eswddl• 11 months ago

Ente Auth or Bitwarden?

dmfdmf• 11 months ago

I think that now that IPV6 has 2^128 addresses that some of these can be assigned to individuals as a unique ID, maybe at birth like SSN. It could serve as the base of a public key and secret private key blockchain system controlled by the individual or his trusted agent in some kind of identifier/authenticator system. If properly implemented it could serve as an anonymous ID and age verification system on the internet which seems to be coming soon in a not-so anonymous form to a fascist, commie or authoritarian govt near you, i.e. all of them as current events now show.

I don't know if that would work but it is an interesting idea to me. However, it also illustrates that authentication and protecting user identity on the web without sacrificing anonymity is a _political_ problem not a technical problem. I have always been told that when thinking about security you have to define what threat are you trying to protect yourself from. I see discussions on security and virtually all of them ignore that the govt or govt controlled corps (i.e. fascism) is a much bigger threat to individuals and freedom than so called "hackers" or "terrorists" and other boogie men, etc.

shmerl2• 11 months ago

One slightly more concerning issue today is that there is effectively no way to export private keys between authentication password managers

Not being able to use the passkey manager at all is a bigger concern. For example Keepassxc works with some sites but not with others. It's super annoying and way worse than situation with passwords.

ewoodrich• 11 months ago

I use Bitwarden and have never had issues saving or using passkeys with any site I can recall via the Chrome extension.

shmerl2• 11 months ago

Well, see here: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10374

I'm pretty sure a lot of this stuff are arbitrary decisions that sites make when they implement passkey support and you never know where it will work. Also some sites likely don't care about fixing it since they think they deliberately are "improving security" or they just don't care. So I'd say it's an ugly mess. I wish it would work though.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 11 months ago

Personally I like the idea of passkeys. However, it needs some sort of easy to export like 2FA seeds, or even BIP39 that some cryptocurrency wallets uses.

The seemingly non-transparent (or was there none?) way to backup to a cold storage (e.g., printed and locked in a physical safe) turns me off.

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lack of identifying passkey provider attestation (which would allow RPs to block you, and something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations). [1]

There is a possibility websites will only allow approved password managers to create/interact with passkeys with attestation, something that is not a problem with the common TOTP + Password or other authentication methods.

Attestation (perhaps targeted for enterprise usage?) but should be a separate spec/extension or something.

[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...

palata34• 11 months ago

Personally I like the idea of passkeys. However, it needs some sort of easy to export

Some passkey implementations can be exported (synced), some can't. By design. E.g. I don't want my Yubikeys to export the private keys, ever.

apitman2• 11 months ago

This is the mechanism by which the Austrian government, for instance, prevents you from using an Open Source or any other software-based authenticator to sign in to do your taxes, access medical records or do anything else that is protected by eID. Instead you have to buy a whitelisted hardware token.

When the time comes to support passkeys on my services, I think I might use attestation in the other direction, ie only offer passkeys to users if I detect they are using a cross-platform password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password. There are simply too many moving pieces (including ad-hoc Bluetooth connections!) to guarantee a good UX when trying to move between the big tech implementations.

loughnane• 11 months ago

I created my first passkey today using bitwarden. After digging around I saw I'm not able to see the keys (ie like I can in ~/.ssh).

I won't do it anymore until I have some way to see them, otherwise I'm essentially locked in, no?

hbogert• 11 months ago

I was totally bummed out that despite buying a industry leader's product, a yubikey; I can't use it as a passkey through NFC on android[1]. It's simply not supported, wth. How can this work as a 2FA through NFC, but not as a passkey. It's easy to get into conspiracy theory mode, but this really feels like there's mixed incentives as Google wants to push their vendored passkey implementation.

[1] https://developers.yubico.com/Developer_Program/WebAuthn_Sta...

smagin• 11 months ago

Like the take that we need to authentificate more often nowadays. AWS makes it extreme — it resets login each 12 hours I reckon, and each time I need to click like 10 times, touch the fingerprint button 3 times (fill email, fill password, passkey), and I fail to imagine how it's not a security theater.

raxxorraxor3• 11 months ago

Passkeys are worthless if you cannot create a backup. This poses as a blatant risk to security that is often neglected to be mentioned. I guess this is purely due to attestation ambitions of companies.

So, yes, username + password or more generally a secret known only to you is superior.

mertleee• 11 months ago

I honestly have no understanding of why people thought passkeys really improved anything... Why would I want to give a massive tech company the ability to usurp ALL of my accounts under the guise of being "more secure".

BrandoElFollito• 11 months ago

I am a security professional and I have an obsession about authentication (along other obsessions).

While I understand and love passkeys, I spend so much time and WTFs on trying to get a passkey for some accounts (that say "what about using a passkey instrad" and omit to say how the fuck to make one), or tell me to connect with a passkey I have no idea where it is.

This is sooo frustrating.

And then I have to explain it to my wife pretending that everything is under control while she suspiciously look at me for yet another annoyance I put on her.

Passkeys and Modern Authentication

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