Despite the attention-grabbing headline, the only negative thing I can find in the article about passkeys are this section:
Attested passkeys7 are the last but most important type of passkeys you need to know about. These types of keys use what’s known as remote attestation to cryptographically verify – using the aforementioned tamper-proof cryptoprocessor that lives in all your modern devices – that you are using one of the several approved passkey managers, and not using a custom one that you vibecoded yourself and which can lie.
This is the feature that means you no longer get to make the calls about your passkeys. Fortunately, attested passkeys are not yet required on most websites.
I don’t see why we should assume this hypothetical is going to happen. There is a lot of different software that supports passkeys (I use keepass for example), and going against the open standard and forcing all their users to use a specific software would basically make them unusable.
Overall every password / login style has its dangers and bad ways to use it, including passkeys. That doesn’t make them “traps”.
This is some weird doom and gloom take on a real improvement in public security that we don’t see very often. Of course there are a lot of stake holders. Of course every protocol is complicated. I run security for a company, and my auth systems mandate attested (i.e., company-provided) hardware keys. You’re not using a passkey on my systems that I’m not providing you. Pretty simple concept, yes?
Do you have any examples of any public service requiring attested keys? No, because it really doesn’t make sense. But because the protocol supports it, people shouldnt use passkeys? Shitty hot take.
I agree it would be helpful to make the feature set clearer to the end user, but the UX are still a mess across OS and websites. IMO that’s not a reason to not use them.
Passkeys are much more phishing resistant. They apply unqiue-credential best practices. I’ve been managing unique passwords for decades, and passkeys are a great improvement. Very few companies are going to completely remove other forms of auth, and so suggesting passkeys are ruining people’s ability to share passwords is really premature. And even so, companies have been pursuing other strategies for identifying shared accounts much more effectively than shared credentials. Thinking that’s a reason to not use passkeys just tells me you aren’t valuing how passkeys elevate public opsec.
Passkeys are projected to overcome TOTP market share next year. That is honestly amazing. I like the writeup on the features, but this nefarious, conspiratorial narrative doesn’t fit what’s actually happening.
My background is very much not in this world so caveat my questions/response below with that mind set. I do however try to practice decent personal opsec such 2fa (TOTP), password manager with random generation, etc.
I feel like a lot of what you stated was covered in the article. For example the article states that problem isn’t the number of stakeholders, it’s that none of them are consumer advocacy groups.
I understand that the author maybe leaned on the password sharing example too much but I think that was in an effort to present the material in a friendlier manner to the average reader. The closing statement makes it clear it’s not really about Netflix, etc. The main concern is that attested passkey requirement will now be the easiest way to force specific software and hardware upon user. The GraphenOS example is a good one.
You might not use the attested flag in that manner but I have zero doubt that once passkey adoption rate passes a certain threshold Google will be more than glad to miss-use that flag to lock people out of their gmail account unless they have the most recent phone and software.
Do you have any examples of any public service requiring attested keys? No, because it really doesn’t make sense. But because the protocol supports it, people shouldnt use passkeys? Shitty hot take.
I think this is a bad take. “Because this potential is not being misused right now it won’t be a problem in the future” has not really served us well thus far.
My understanding is that the article is saying that passkeys are giving away too much control to the second party. That can and will be abused.
But again, layman’s understanding from my end.
Happy to discuss a few points you’ve brought up.
it’s that none of them are consumer advocacy groups.
I would put that more as a curiosity than a red flag. I doubt they were excluding groups, but happy to hear about if they were (e.g. donation minimums or something to that effect). The author actually says that whole paragraph is “notable” – great, noted. I hope that doesn’t mean they were using it as an argument for “Do not use [passkeys]” (the title of the article). FWIW, W3C recommends use of passkeys. EFF has had blog articles for 3+ years suggesting advantages of Passkeys. I also don’t know what a consumer advocacy group would suggest differently here – DONT implement an attestation spec? Attestation is a massive improvement for specific types of security.
The GraphenOS example is a good one.
I went and looked for what you were referring to and didn’t find anything. What do you mean by this? I use GrapheneOS. I use passkeys. Google being hostile to third party OS doesn’t seem related but maybe I am missing something.
I have zero doubt that once passkey adoption rate passes a certain threshold Google will be more than glad to miss-use that flag to lock people out of their gmail account unless they have the most recent phone and software.
Well this seems like a reasonable point I should expand on. Maybe I can plant a seed of doubt about this hypothesis. A few comments:
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People being locked out of their email is actually one of the biggest logistical nightmares for email providers. Proving someone is who they say they are is actually fairly difficult as well as doing it at scale. People lock themselves out of their own email. People get locked out of their email because of phishing attacks. In practice, Passkeys reduce phishing rates significantly. That’s a massive win for email providers in reducing their burden. Intentionally locking out a massive number of their customers is an unthinkably bad move, comically bad. It wouldn’t happen.
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Email is the most important mechanism of communication for people’s security. Bank and financial accounts, paid services, government notices… they are almost all through email. The idea that they will vendor-lock email to specific hardware… it’s not realistic. They would face such massive PR And public blowback. Email is also accessed from more than just your phone. “Requiring” an attested phone would kill a massive use case.
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People already feel locked to their email provider – it’s extremely difficult to change all contacts you have to a new email address. Passkeys don’t change that. Phone hardware doesn’t change that. So I’d say it’s just a continued problem, and not a reason to not use passkeys.
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The FIDO Alliance had like three phone manufacturers out of 250 members.
Overall, I don’t see how passkeys, or attestation, could lead to a world where any public service would want to require attestation, and even if they did, there’s no reason it would be “requires my X branded phone”. These companies supported the development of this protocol for the specific reason of NOT wanting to cater to specific vendors. This is a vendor-neutral specification. There are many hardware and software providers. They all have their own motivations, and they hope implementing the spec brings in more customers, improves consumer security, and reduces their operational costs. Do you still have zero doubts about a future world with vendor-locked attested passkeys for public services?
passkeys are giving away too much control to the second party.
There are already dozens of hardware and software passkey vendors. It’s honestly amazing how little lock-in there is. There’s a half dozen FOSS authn services providing passkey services. You can buy dedicated hardware for passkeys from multiple independent companies. What “control” are you referring to? Companies could always force rotate your password, make it invalid, etc. Any control you thought you had was an illusion.
Cheers
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Thanks.
Thanks.
This is why I only use passkeys that are stored in my self hosted vault warden. As long as you don’t create passkeys locked to a vendor’s manager, I don’t see any reason to avoid them.
The Bitwarden client is so bad though. I seem to only be able to use the passkey on the specific device I saved it in.
Hmm I haven’t had that issue, I have a lot of passkeys saved and they sync fine and are usable in Firefox on my laptop as well as with apps on my pixel 5 running lineage. I have noticed that occasionally an app will refuse to give me the option to create a passkey in bitwarden, but I just skip those and I haven’t noticed that issue in a while.
Have you checked whether the site entry shows the passkey on both devices? On mine it’ll say “passkey created …” on both devices in the vault.
The main problem is that there’s no place to view my passkeys like there is for passwords for TOTP (according to my searching and their website, anyway)
When you go to log in with a site that uses passkeys, bitwarden pops up with a list of passkeys for that site, the same way autofill shows your logins for that site.
This is actually a terrible take. Passkeys provide a very large security benefit over passwords and have an open standard.
It’s particularly ridiculous that they seem to think TOTP good passkey bad. They solve the same problem: symmetric persistent encryption like passwords is very weak. TOTP solves this my making it not persisting and passkeys solve this by making it asymmetric. Passkeys are mildly more convenient because you don’t have the copy a code over.
Both also have the same potential for abuse, any service could require you use their specific app. The fact that this article makes it sound like TOTP is a perfect open standard while passkeys are a Trojan horse for abuse is ridiculous. If most services are using the open standard for TOTP why wouldn’t they for passkeys? Also not all services do obey the open standard for TOTP. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was forced to install the duo Authenticator because their institution was somehow sold on their protocol being stronger than the open standard.
TOTP and passkeys are comparable and both with doing.
Never used. Each time a website asks me if I want to create one I have this uneasy feeling of not actually owning the key.
If your security relies on a password, you will always be anxious that somebody, somewhere, has somehow figured out what it is and already has access to your bank account.
No I won’t. All my passwords are something like
I0!2b6KJ!eA04WiJ&&MFToCQ7CN*4mvband each is used for only one thing because I’ve been using a password manager for over a decade.TIL what passkeys are. Thx for sharing.
