this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Most people that have password managers are already using different passwords for each website. Usually randomly generated. What's the difference between that and a passkey?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

A pass key is the private key in a private/public key pair. The private key is stored in the TPM on your device. The website contains the public key. When you use your "one password" you're in effect giving your device permission to access the key storage in your TPM to fetch the private key to present it to the site.

What this means in practice is that if a website has a data breach they won't have your hashed password, only your public key which... is public. It doesn't and can't do anything on its own. It needs the private key, which again only you have and the website doesn't store, to do anything at all.

If you want to read more about it look into cryptographic key pairs. Pretty neat how they work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you use your “one password” you’re in effect giving your device permission to access the key storage in your TPM to fetch the private key to present it to the site.

Very small correction as I understand, but your private key is never presented. The web service should never interact with the private key directly. Your device is signing some bit of data, then the server uses your public key to verify that it was signed by your private key. Its a small distinction, but is one of the principal uses of asymmetric encryption is that the public key can truly be public knowledge and given to anyone, while the private key is 100% always only accessed by you the user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the TPM should perform the signature inside of the security chip, the key is always off limits from everything else

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