this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
291 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

59421 readers
3034 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
291
Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
190 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won't work on another device.

Now I don't know if that key can be stolen or not, or if it's really more secure or not, as people have really unsecure pins.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes, but that's missing the important part.

Passkeys is not primarily about asymmetric keys. It's about applying asymmetric keys to the Web as an open standard.

The W3C Web-Authn standard is what makes it important and revolutionary.

This is just as important as HTML, CSS and ActivityPub.

Finally we have an open standard that integrates in the web and offers a high level of security.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is that like TLS client-side certificates?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's actually quite similar, yes, in the sense that it uses a public/private key pair linked to your account.

But this works on the application layer and you don't use certificates.

Much easier to setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Also it generates unique keys per site so it doesn't help anybody track you