Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
I’m sorry, but this still sounds as much like “Mares eat oats” as it did when I first heard it a decade ago. You still enter a username and password somewhere (ideally in your password manager) to gain access to your account.
The difference is, that even if you enter the "password" on a phishing site, it is useless. Or when the server is compromised.
The only way the passkey can get compromised, is when the device that holds it gets compromised.
The same reason why hardware tokens for things like FIDO or U2F are recommended.
That makes no sense to me — and I’m not technically illiterate. If it makes no sense to someone like me, there was never any hope that it would be adopted by the masses who just want things to work. Google may not have helped here, and I’m certainly not among their fans, but it’s hardly entirely their fault that it never caught on.
You have a point that it will be hard to explain this to everyone on why it is better.
From my understanding, when you use a password manager, the user will enter a pw into it that they remember and the vault will unlock. Then when they go to log into a website, a different, longer, and impossible to remember password will be sent to the site at login. (Assuming they are using the manager well). A week later when they go to log in again, the same long password will be delivered.
The problem is that if a bad actor gets involved, whether it is the website is attacked or they send the user a phishing url or something and the password from the manager is exposed, it will have to be changed. That scammer can now log into that website as the user whenever they want, and possibly any other website that user used the same password for. Hopefully they didn’t if they are using a manager.
With passkeys, a user will log into their manager with a password they remember, but when they go to log into a website, a different token will be sent, based on their key, every time. So if a scammer is listening at the router they still can’t log in again because it has expired.
It is still not a perfect thing, I would imagine that phishing sites could still get a scammer in, who could possibly do bad things or change the login credentials but it is still much more secure than sending a password to the site for the user.