Ricky Mondello (@rmondello@hachyderm.io)
hachyderm.ioIf you actually read the “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.” post going around, you’ll find a transparent attempt to clumsily string together a conspiracy.
The post is predicated on the idea that a feature of WebAuthn called “attestation”, which is only used in high-assurance and usually corporate scenarios, and usually with physical hardware security keys, will be leveraged to hurt people, somehow.
The post posits that a website like X will bait and switch users: first, you get a passkey. Then, later, scary “attested” passkeys! This simply isn’t possible to do because attestation isn’t supported on the web for mass market, consumer authentication.
Attestation for passkeys (software-based, syncable credentials) is antithetical to their mass market goals, and would freeze out independent, non-corporate-backed credential managers. It’s an explicit non-goal of the designers of passkeys, who work together in a forum anyone can join.
And trust me, websites and apps like banks repeatedly asked for attestation at the beginning of the industry’s passkey journey. The platforms, browsers, and credential management apps have held firm that the goal of passkeys is reducing phishing and **not** some kind of trusted computing scheme. (And I will note: over my dead body!)
Besides the theory of the case being fundamentally wrong, there are several things that make the post disqualifying in terms of arguing something useful or important in the realm of security, privacy, and user authentication:
1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!)
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.
3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed.
There are bad things happening in tech and untrustworthy people and companies do exist, but they’re largely in the AI space, not the “let’s stop people we love from getting compromised through phishing” space.
A rebuttal to an anti-passkey, pro-TOTP post that has made the rounds on Lemmy as well.
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After reading both of the posts, I’m kind of back where I started with passkeys: neutral. I’m pretty happy with my current setup of a self-hosted password manager, diceware master passphrase and strong, unique passwords for every account, along with an open source app for TOTP. I only ever see passkeys pushed on me for work-related accounts anyway, but I’m not using them there either. I do have a question though if someone can answer: are passkey protected logins also vulnerable to stolen session cookies?
So it’s fair that you are neutral about them for your own use, clearly you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t make sense to be neutral about them, generally. On usability alone they are not good. There are so many people who don’t have a clue how they work, or their consequences, and just click okay when continually harassed into using them. Some will even go ahead and save one on a shared computers, or someone else’s, ‘because the website says so’.
Honestly, I don’t understand them well enough to recommend them either. I do IT, and I set my users up with a (managed) password manager and MS Authenticator. If I encounter a situation where a user has ended up with a passkey for a given service, I just leave it be. On the other hand, if someone is locked out because of a passkey, I reset it and get them set back up with the Authenticator app.
The web wasn’t supposed to be controlled by corps either, and look where we are now.
If passkeys were to follow the same path as the web, here’s what it would look like. Corporate passkeys get the most users because of OS integration and convenience. Now that they have all the users they can commandeer the standards, and make them so complex and evolve so quickly that non-corporate implementations can’t keep up (think Firefox vs Chrome). Corporations convince websites to drop support for outdated passkeys, citing security issues. Non-corporate implementations are locked out. Monopoly is established.
And now that passkeys are centralized to corps, the government can exert power on them, mandating hardware attestation for things like hardware-backed id and age verification. They push for backdoors, so they can log into anybody’s account. Bye bye privacy.
Passwords are protected (for now) by the first amendment. You can’t be compelled to tell what it is. Passkeys can be seized with a warrant. This only matters in the US but it does matter and I literally never see that addressed.
First time I am reading people orate their passwords🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Now you’re going to tell me the US has free press🤣😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂
Nah, lock-in is not a safety feature. 16+ random chars are plenty, and if cracking gets better I’ll go to 20 or 30 chars. My pw manager doesn’t care what strings go in it or which device opens it up.
That’s my workflow as well 26 random characters, a yubikey (and Aegis TOTP for sites that don’t have fido or similar) and I’m good.
I like the idea of a Yubikey but there is no way it would survive more than a month on me due to the conditions where I work. And getting a physical key then not having it on my body at all times is a non-starter.
I keep my keepass .kdbx in on a webdav server and that covers any device I can think of.
Do you work in a blender? It’s a pretty solid bit of plastic, should be fine in a pocket or wherever the device you’re using it with is.
Maintenance at a blast furnace. I am exposed to acidic vapours, caustic vapours, ambient heat in the 60c range, radiant heat in the 1000c range, rock from the nanometer up to 30cm size, phenolic resins, oil mists, and metal powders. And then there’s the crawling around over, under, and between equipment.
Not every tech-savvy person works in an office.
True story … take it as you like,
my 8 months old reddit account was filter flagged as a bot after commenting the following
“death to the Epstein class and fuck Israel the genocide state”
The only way to get it back according to reddit was if i used IOS authentication passkey.
Not the normal password manager i use on Firefox but no it must be passkey on ios.
Now i am convinced that 8200 unit of the Zionist regime have my facial biometrics.
A passkey is just traditional PKI in a trench coat, your biometrics are A) not even required as you can just use a PIN and B) are not sent from iOS when unlocking the passkey.
Yeah, I am not sure about the part of its not being sent
I love how you provided no rebuttal to my two points. The EFF even goes into detail on how it works. The beauty of an open standard is that you can verify these assumptions of yours.
I don’t need to, if you read my comment again you would understand my point.
But let me try to breakdown what i mean; you need to wake up from your lala land, if you truly think and believe corporations that are actively participating in genocide and killing children will really care about “policies and terms of usage”.
Your statement reads like someone who used to believe the “don’t be evil“ google policy citing it as evidence in his head.
If that is how you stand, then good for you, but i don’t, actually i view such corporations as a dangerous entities to humanity.
Hope its clear for you now.
The author of this post works in Apple, Passwords team. They do not deny that there’s attestation; they argue that it’s only used to prevent bad actors.
Cool, we’ll trust corporations then!
and they would never violate your trust and later force this onto you because the love their users.
the more apologetics for this shit i see, the less i trust it.
Not much of a rebuttal imho. We still have the problem that passkeys are ok in theory, but in practice they’re being pushed as a way to increase lock-in and don’t offer compelling advantages over well-managed passwords.
But most people don’t have well managed passwords. And me having good password hygiene doesn’t stop my data being hacked when someone working at a subcontracting firm to a company I use leaks all my data.
It also is annoying to have to log in over many steps with 2fa, often forced to email or SMS.
Collectively improving security benefits us all.