Security vendors join forces to make passkeys more portable for everyone | Bitwarden Blog
bitwarden.com
external-link
FIDO Alliance publishes industry standards for consumers to easily and securely transfer passkeys across platforms and password managers.

Looks like a huge amount of security vendors are working to have a secure and open standard for passkey portability between platforms.

It is always good to see major collaboration in the security space like this considering the harsh opinions that users of some of these vendors have toward many of the others. I just wish apps and sites would stop making me login with username and password if passkeys are meant to replace that lol.

zerozaku
link
fedilink
112M

Why is the buzz around passkeys is back? I am seeing them way more often than they used to be. I think I have created passkeys for 2 apps and don’t even know how that worked, it such a breeze that almost felt it wasn’t secure lol.

In what ways the passkeys are different than authenticator apps?

Soothing Salamander
creator
link
fedilink
152M

Passkeys are meant to replace password-based login whereas TOTP apps are only meant as a 2FA method.

Convenience and security.

Authenticator apps are still vulnerable to phishing, passkeys are not.

With the ability to transfer passkeys, the attack vector phishing does not sound that far fetched. Tho i have not looked into the transfer process.

We will see i guess.

Idk, a SSH-Key is also transferrable, yet it’s still safe

And given that Passkeys are essentially specialized ssh-keys, I don’t see the Problem.

But I’d like to know it I’m wrong.

Why do you think SSH-Keys are safe against phishing? I mean it is unlikely, that someone will just send the key per mail or upload it somewhere since most ppl using SSH-Keys are more knowledgeable.

When you now get an easy one click solution to transfer Passkeys from one Cloud provider to another it will get easier to trick a user to do that. Scenario: You get a mail from Microsoft that there is a thread and that you need to transfer your keys to their cloud.

The thing is, that you only have to share public keys and never private ones. So you can only phish public keys…

@Ferk@lemmy.ml
link
fedilink
2
edit-2
2M

You share public keys when registering the passkey on a third party service, but for the portability of the keys to other password managers (what the article is about) the private ones do need to be transferred (that’s the whole point of making them portable).

I think the phishing concerns are about attackers using this new portability feature to get a user (via phishing / social engineering) to export/move their passkeys to the attacker’s store. The point is that portability shouldn’t be so user-friendly / transparent that it becomes exploitable.

That said, I don’t know if this new protocol makes things THAT easy to port (probably not?).

@Petter1@lemm.ee
link
fedilink
1
edit-2
2M

Well, they made it very secure with the transfer of passwords /s

It felt so strange having a CSV file with all my passwords and 2FA secrets in plain text in my downloads folder…

Imagine if would not have used a encrypted partition, my passwords may still be on that disk…

The thing is, that you only have to share public keys and never private ones. So you can only phish public keys…

How would you sync or transfer a passkey across devices without transferring the private key?

That’s July question: the article even points that out. If previously the private key was in hardware, never exposed, but now it has to be available to software. Does it open any potential attacks?

Even if it is less secure, this is probably a good thing to prevent vendor lock-in. I know that’s one reason I rarely use passkeys

Yea, I strictly did not set up any passkeys until I got strongbox pro, to store it outside of apple walled garden. To get 2FA secrets was hard enough (had long time no macOS device, only iOS)

That was a rhetorical question towards the commenter since the discussion point was not understood.

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.12K Posts
  • 78K Comments
  • Modlog