this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
271 points (86.3% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
7244 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not gonna lie I still don't understand how passkeys work, or how they're different from 2fa. I'm just entering a PIN and it's ok somehow? I don't get it.
It uses asymmetric cryptography. You sign a login request with the locally stored private key and the service verifies the signature with their stored public key. The PIN on your device is used to unlock access to the private key to sign the login request.
So isn't the pin now the weakest link and shorter than a password
Typically in most situations where a PIN is used on a modern device, it is not just the number you enter but some kind of hardware backing that is limited to the local device and also does things like rate limiting attempts.