this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Man, the amount of fearmongering and anti-Google rhetoric in this thread makes me sad. Passkeys are almost entirely a good thing and are supported by many big and small companies.
No, it won’t lock you into Google, it’s an open web standard. Google will have an Authenticator, Apple will, and third parties will spring up to support it as well. And there’s no lock in, you can get a new passkey when you want to switch devices or providers.
No, someone who gets access to your device can’t get access to everything if you have basic security hygeine. Secure your passkeys with a secondary password or use biometric authentication.
Yes, it’s almost a straight upgrade to text passwords. They are immune to phishing attacks and other social engineering tricks, and you don’t need to remember long strings of numbers and letters anymore.
Do your research people, sheesh.
The problem with passkeys is that surrender of a physical key is not protected by the 4th amendment and subject to seizure. From a security perspective, I agree that passkeys are good. But I only use a physical key as a secondary factor. Never a primary.
The courts have ruled that you can't be forced to give up a password or passcode. (We'll have to see if the current court will keep this precedent.)
Until we get better privacy protections, I'm not trusting passkeys whole cloth.
There is no implementation right now that enables you to own and manage your own passkey backups without Google it icloud.
Additionally, the attestation feature is one step away from banks and other sites mandating specific implementations, preventing people from using software tokens or OSS managers.
Passkeys is great, and I am eager to recommend it to everyone, but without those items addressed, it's a trap door, and one bitflip away from very strong lock in.
The same webauthn standard allows you to use a security key with PIN luck