This is why I don't bother with these if they have a weaker workaround, which will be open to remote hacking.
The issue isn't what passkeys _are_ (e.g. explaining they are like public/private "ssh keys" and hoping that type of explanation ends the confusion).
Instead, it's the workflow around passkeys. The websites show very confusing dialog popups and choices that a lot of normal people will not understand. This is a good article with screenshots showing the confusion: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/passkey-technology-...
I have senior citizens asking me about passkeys because their bank and medical websites keep reminding them about switching to passkeys every time they login into their accounts. My recommendation to them is not to do it unless they have a simplistic single vendor setup such as only Apple iPhone and MacBook with iCloud Passwords app. If instead they have a mixed Windows + Apple setup with 3rd-party password manager, they could accidentally put a new passkey into the os or browser instead of their external password manager and not realize what has happened. This happens because the different parties implementing passkeys all have different agendas that suits their interests and that's what makes the workflow confusing for normal people.
Just absurd.
Or google. If you use android and chrome then it all just works.
But god help you if you want to use a password manager to keep everything in sync; I haven't yet found a way for a mobile app or web page to explicitly signal to the device that the passkey to be created should live in $password_manager and not whatever built-in/on-device key-store exists.
So I only really use pass keys for desktop/web things because that's the only place the "store/read from $password_manager" flow _works_.
On Android 17 (on Pixel) you can select the password service under Settings -> Passwords and passkeys -> Preferred service.
If you have an alternative password manager installed, it will be listed there along with Google's own password manager. iOS has a similar setting but I don't know exactly where off the top of my head.
I have this set to my password manager but I still can't _use_ the pass-keys in my password manager to sign in to most apps.
Setting your preferred password/passkey manager on Android 17 to 1Password works fine in Chrome and Firefox to log in to any site, presenting passkeys managed in 1Password. It also works in all of Meta's native apps. (I'm pretty sure it works the same in Bitwarden.)
Whatever issue you're having, it's not an inherent limitation of Android passkeys. It might be a bug in your passkey manager…?
So yeah, this is cross platform on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
If you lose your bank passkey, (e.g. if you put it in the wrong password manager and you can't figure out where it is) you can just sign in with your bank password.
In the worst case, banks actually don't make it very hard for seniors to reset your password/passkey; just show up at a branch with photo ID, your bank card, and your PIN, and a teller will help you reset your credentials. They do it all the time.
And, remember, seniors could also put a randomly generated password into the wrong password manager. In that case, they'll either have to reset their password, or they'll have figure out what they did, retrieve their password from the OS password manager, and transfer that password to their preferred password manager.
The exact same story applies to passkeys, except, because passkeys can't be copied and pasted, you'd have to figure out how to use the finicky app-to-app transfer system ("Credential Exchange Protocol"). That's probably too complicated for most seniors, so falling back to a password is almost certainly their best bet.
Maybe... I just ran into an annoying scenario where the largest bank in Canada made an administrative error where they mislinked an account belonging to me to my wife's profile.
I went to a physical branch to get it fixed and was told that branches don't have that kind of ability so I'd have to call customer support.
I called customer support and failed the verification questions because the expected answers were wrong, based on their own clerical error. After failing the verification questions, I just got a "we have to end this call, no additional information can be provided, please visit a branch."
I was able to get around it by calling back in and providing the incorrect, but expected answers to pass the verification step - I imagine, however, that this could have turned into a real nightmare for seniors, or anyone who wasn't able to deduce what the expected verification answers were.
You forgot about the endless frustration and annoyance.
What are the branches even for if not customer support?
Lots of physical locations make the bank seem big/safe/reputable.
Beyond that, it's sales and a place to have ATMs. I have sometimes been able to get a replacement card issued at a branch instead of waiting for one to show up in the mail.
Some branches will accommodate special requests like "can I withdraw $200... in two dollar bills" / take coin deposits but that's been increasingly rare.
In the UK at least, there are very few brick & mortar branches anymore - banks expect everything to be done online.
You can click "try another way" and use your password, and then you'll have access to your bank. But then, you should try to resolve that problem. If you (or a trusted friend/family member) can figure out how to use settings to remove the passkey from your bank's account settings, you can do that, or you can ask a bank teller to help you, instead.
(And, luckily, you won't need a bank teller, because you'll still have access to your account.)
At virtually all banks, the bank tellers cannot help you with login problems. You will have to call the bank's tech support and somehow navigate AI-modulated phone menu hell.
I don't have a citation for you just recent experience, do you have a citation?
My credit union has people who can help with any online banking/website login issues. They aren't tellers, but they are there. You just need to ask to speak to a customer service rep.
ITS NOT SIMPLE AT ALL
1. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant authentication method for enterprise users (companies loose quite a lot of money to phishing).
2. Majority of industry players shared the vision of a credential which is available across the platforms and browsers
3. The vision for collaboration never materialized so everyone went their own way to implement it. Examples would be google rolling out browser (Chrome) managed authentication which led to this situation where even on the same machine you have to remember which browser you used to create the Passkey credential.
4. Interestingly enough the earlier popular name was WebAuthn, Apple started calling it Passkey on fly, given Apple's popularity everyone just caved in.
5. My personal interpretation is that in some sense Apple wanted to be the default password manager on Apple devices.
6. This is when all password manager companies jumped in strongly to save their business and the protocol went into a direction where you can use your existing password manager to store the credential/Passkey as well
Personally its a mess, the phishing resistant aspect has its own benefits though. If you are using it with security in mind then my recommendation would be to use a hardware backed security key with NFC enabled. Everything else is pretty much lipstick on pig, they are worse than passwords in some sense from usage perspective.
Multiple pieces of software vying to be your passkey provider, often using dark patterns so you don’t realize you’re making a choice, and not using the term “passkey” so people are using the technology without knowing what it is or how to research it.
Kind of reflects the state of the web today, where every company wants to be your intermediary in every interaction, from making a purchase to transcribing a meeting.
Which entirely defeats the point of using passkeys. There shouldn't be a passkey provider the "provider" is your device's TPM/secure enclave + your biometric challenge. They are supposed to be mathematically non-exportable, device-bound.
FIDO 1.0 started as two different standards: UAF and U2F. U2F was for USB keys used as second factors (so almost always stored in a TPM-like chip and device-bound, but not provided by your platform and there could be multiple of them). UAF were either provided by your platform or by any software and there was no requirement for them to be stored in TPM. Back in the day, very few platform had any FIDO support built-in, so in practice UAF was always done in software (usually based on whatever biometrics/TPM the hardware provided).
So competing options were the default for early FIDO, getting a default platform option is something that came later.
Which would make the whole scheme unworkable (at least for me).
I’m a little afraid that hardware tokens are getting lost in all the passkey marketing BS. At least they continue to work for now.
passkeys are not meant to be a second factor; they are meant to replace the password as a primary factor.
>to protect against the theft or compromise of your primary device.
I love Yubikeys, but the only additional protection you get by making the passkey hardware-bound is preventing an attacker who has already compromised your operating system from stealing the credential.
But! Unless you are also doing hardware binding of the session (aka cookie) after sign-in, then doing hardware binding of your credential is mostly security theater, because the attacker can just wait for you to sign in and then steal your session.
And there is standards work happening separately for hardening session security, such as DBSC: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-dbsc/
I have no idea if Yubico is involved with DBSC, but I would hope that they are, because it would help them make Yubikeys live up to the security guarantees that I personally feel are heavily implied by their marketing.
>1. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant authentication method for enterprise users (companies loose quite a lot of money to phishing).
This is incorrect. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant primary factor that could compete with the usability of passwords to the point that consumers would actually want to adopt it.
>2. Majority of industry players shared the vision of a credential which is available across the platforms and browsers
This is correct/accurate.
> 3. The vision for collaboration never materialized so everyone went their own way to implement it. Examples would be google rolling out browser (Chrome) managed authentication which led to this situation where even on the same machine you have to remember which browser you used to create the Passkey credential.
IIRC at least Chrome's default on Apple platforms is to save to the Passwords app by default. There are then multiple fallback options in the case that the user isn't using the default credential provider -- ultimately falling back all the way to cross-device passkey sign-in (the QR-code initiated sign in) or Security Key.
The security engineering behind the QR-code cross-device sign-in stuff is interesting: https://www.corbado.com/blog/webauthn-passkey-qr-code#4-pass...
That said, I strongly agree that fragmentation of where passkeys get saved is super confusing and I wish there:
(a) was stronger guidance from the FIDO alliance on both educating users that it's totally fine to have multiple passkeys across different ecosystems (e.g. one in Apple, one in Google), and;
(b) that all the credential managers could figure out a better way to place nice together and make it super clear to the end-user where a passkey is getting stored, what context it's for (e.g. personal vs. work), and actively help them store it in the right place (which might be different credential manager app for personal vs. work!).
> 4. Interestingly enough the earlier popular name was WebAuthn, Apple started calling it Passkey on fly, given Apple's popularity everyone just caved in.
This is incorrect -- passkeys are not just another name for WebAuthn. If you go back and look at the original definition Apple gave for the word passkey, you'll find that it was meant to be a discoverable WebAuthn credential that syncs across a user's devices with end-to-end encryption. There was a bunch of industry thrash around the definition, but it seems like the original Apple definition has largely stuck/settled now, and when passkeys don't sync they're typically called "device-bound passkeys" rather than just "passkeys".
>5. My personal interpretation is that in some sense Apple wanted to be the default password manager on Apple devices.
If you go back and watch the original passkeys announcement from Apple, their stated goal was to create something that is both a better user experience and more secure than passwords. By "better user experience", they meant the act of creating credentials and then repeatedly using those credentials (logging in).
Part of actually achieving that goal means there needs to be something that "just works automatically out of the box" which means there needs to be a built-in credential manager. That said, Apple credential manager had already existed for many many years by the time passkeys came around. The only thing that changed was instead of being solely accessible from inside System Settings (which was hard for the average user to find), the functionality moved into a standalone Passwords app.
>6. This is when all password manager companies jumped in strongly to save their business and the protocol went into a direction where you can use your existing password manager to store the credential/Passkey as well
I think it's a huge positive that all the password managers jumped on board, and that they could jump on board (since WebAuthn is an open standard). I think this is a good thing for consumer choice and for overall adoption and perception of passkeys. A lot of folks (including on this thread) have big tech lock-in conspiracy theories about passkeys, and the conspiracy theories would be even more prevalent without a wide spectrum of consumer choice for credential managers.
>If you are using it with security in mind then my recommendation would be to use a hardware backed security key with NFC enabled. Everything else is pretty much lipstick on pig, they are worse than passwords in some sense from usage perspective.
Passkeys protect against phishing attacks, and you get that protection regardless of whether the credential is hardware-bound or not. That protection comes from the cryptographic binding of the credential to the domain at the time of credential creation.
The only additional protection you get by making the passkey hardware-bound is preventing an attacker who has already compromised your operating system from stealing the credential. But! Unless you are also doing hardware binding of the session (aka cookie) after sign-in, then doing hardware binding of your credential is mostly security theater, because the attacker can just wait for you to sign in and then steal your session.
And there is standards work happening separately for hardening session security, such as DBSC: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-dbsc/
1. This can be subjective, Unfortunately Customer identity is not on the highest priority from security perspective, its all about ease of product use when it comes to customer identity. For customer identity, most account recovery methods still fall back to email or SMS even if you have 2FA configured. The real money lost with phishing is with enterprise identity, when some one poses as an employee. The recovery of these accounts can be managed. If a customer account gets hacked then the business is not really on the hook to make it even.
> Usability of passwords
This is the biggest point of contention as per my interpretation. The industry did a very poor job of securing their infrastructure leading the massive leaks of password databases. Instead of fixing that goal post changed, with the by introduction of PASSWORDLESS. The passwordless works just fine for enterprise identities, not the customer identity. Even for enterprises, you cannot get rid of passwords if you get into AAL concepts (guidelines provided by NIST for authenticator assurance levels)
4. I was working on WebAuthn when the term passkey was not there, I was there when the term was introduced, I saw how every one was trying to map their existing definition/understnading with the new terminology specially the part where Apple just announced them to be syncable. Enterprise companies had to actually disable the Apple Passkeys for this reason to begin with. I found it interesting to see how Yubico changed their documentation overnight, they switched every instance of WebAuthn keyword with Passkey. It took some time to settle on how to categorize discoverable credentials (where meta information about user is on the device in addition to credential) and non-discoverable credentials (hardware keys, they are limited in space so they did not store user meta information in earlier versions). Eventually google took the lead in calling the credential where private key cannot be synched as Security key and everything else as Passkey. Resident key, syncable, synched are all different bits of the WebAuthn assertion
5. Thats an interpretation of how I read things based on the overall play going on.
> Passkeys protect against phishing attacks, and you get that protection regardless of whether the credential is hardware-bound or not. That protection comes from the cryptographic binding of the credential to the domain at the time of credential creation.
The security aspect is tightly coupled with the authenticator implementation. The phishing aspect is the only default good in here, it just means that the credential is strictly tied to a particular domain, the one on which it was set, that too is highly dependent on the client (browser) doing the right thing. Additionally you have to count on the server to not get compromised as well (There is a a feature to support multiple domains).
Most importantly, when you make something this hard and complex to understand then be advised that people are going to make mistakes in implementation and leave gaps in security.
(I.e., Yubikeys and other USB sticks.)
It works fine and it a no-brainer to use.
The problems start when vendors start trying to shoehorn their shitty cloud auth services into WebAuthn.
Too bad for Yubikey. I don't need them any more.
With the "cloud password manager" angle there is some hope of being user friendly, although we're certainly not there yet for most folks.
- Only one specific device can ever login (bad).
- It doesn't limit login to one specific device, therefore it does nothing.
Linking Passkeys to a physical device was always DoA. At least not without a way to enroll every device you own, and strong recovery strategies. But considering how inconsistent every company's Passkey implementation is (inc. many that only allow ONE TOTAL!), it is DoA.
That's entirely service dependent, and the standard doesn't mandate "Service must not allow multiple passkeys"
> It doesn't limit login to one specific device, therefore it does nothing.
It's not nothing. It provides an attestation that you the user are in physical possession of the device, and have passed the challenge to release the key form the TPM (biometrics, pin, something like a yubikey).
Giving your private key to a cloud password vault makes it phishable again (via an attacker getting acsess to your vault, just like with passwords). The private keys are supposed to be non-exportable, and the cloud password managers defeat that as well.
> That's entirely service dependent, and the standard doesn't mandate "Service must not allow multiple passkeys"
Unfortunately, given the laziness, incompetence, and cost-consciousness of organizations like traditional financial institutions, telcos, governments, etc., many of them have & will end up with that implementation.
I use multiple devices and I want to log in to things using only my master password. I also want to be able to back up my credentials to local encrypted storage so I can restore them if my password manager service provider stops operating or becomes untenable.
> But you're not going to lose it, because you use a password manager, and the passkey will be stored there and synchronized to all of your other devices
That's just wrong. I use android, my partner uses ios. If he creates the passkey in safari, it's not going to get synced over to my phone. And that's just the first of the family sharing passwords issues. Same person issue is also present if somebody uses an iphone and a windows laptop, or chromebook.
It doesn't help that all modern browsers eagerly try to step in and offer their implementation of passkeys for logins, and they're not featured enough to support the type of shared access or synced access many people would expect from a password manager. How useful is your firefox passwords on an iphone? Or Mac OS's keychain I use as a daily driver on my windows gaming desktop?
> Major password managers don’t even allow you to export your passkeys to a file that you can read/backup yourself
This is wrong. Every single major password manager supports export. Lastpass, 1password and bitwarden all do that.
> It's past time to move off of LastPass. LastPass lost all of your passwords again last month
That just isn't true. Last month, their third party customer support portal was breached. That did not involve passwords.
They all support exporting passwords, but, check your CSV; you won't find any passkeys in the CSV export for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, 1Password, or LastPass.
(Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and KeepassXC do support exporting passkeys to CSV, which undermines the phishing protections, at least somewhat. It’s possible to trick you into exporting your passkeys from Bitwarden and sending the file to an attacker. It’s up to you to decide whether protecting yourself from being tricked into exporting your passkeys is worth sacrificing your ability to read them.)
> How useful is your firefox passwords on an iphone?
Did you try it? That's the primary feature of the Firefox app for iPhone.
(Especially since the Firefox app for iPhone is just Safari's WebKit wearing a Firefox disguise.)
> Or Mac OS's keychain I use as a daily driver on my windows gaming desktop?
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pktq5699m62?hl=en-US&gl=U...
> With the iCloud for Windows app, you can access photos, files, passwords, and other important information from your iPhone or other Apple devices on your Windows PC.
When Apple's your password manager, you use Apple's password manager app to synchronize passwords and passkeys.
It would, if the people implementing it weren't all so obsessed with pushing their own platform-specific solutions over enabling open standards. LastPass works fine on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows, but each one of those platforms defaults to saving passkeys in their own platform-specific store unless you jump through hoops to specifically save them somewhere else.
There. You just violated the premise of his point, that you use a password manager that syncs to all your devices.
The passkeys sync just fine between iOS and Android on our devices using 1Password.
It's a nice simplifying step to talk about password managers here, but in the majority of the cases this won't be handled by a password manager, but rather by the device operating system, and the device manufacturers really like that lock in.
They're also in an especially good position to abuse it, because they now know every service that you authenticate and the webauthn "attestation object" field lets them set up a side channel with those services such that they can sell additional information about you.
Some people will tell you that the attestation object is not used in the consumer passkey system, so there's no way for this abuse to occur, but since it's usually going to be the device manufacturer who controls the password-manager-like component here, and they're the ones who stand to profit most from this kind of abuse, I think we need stronger guarantees than "the spec says you shouldn't do this unless the user is your employee and you paid for their device".
Until they fix this, I'm sticking with my mess of TOTP authenticators and yubikeys.
You're right that all of the major password managers like their lock in. The Credential Exchange Protocol is just barely good enough that OS vendors can say they "support" it, but tricky enough to find that ordinary users probably will never try it. (Not to mention that it doesn't even work yet on Windows or Android.)
As for attestation, the good news is that Apple always returns 0s for the attestation ID (because Apple, like you, opposes it as a side channel), and so any public site/app that insists on attestation would reject all Apple devices. This gives smaller password managers like Bitwarden sufficient cover to 0-out their attestation as well.
That's a red flag to me. It's enough that phone backup systems go out of their way to prevent you from accessing your own data, too, for unexplained "sekhurity" reasons.
> P.S. It's past time to move off of LastPass. LastPass lost all of your passwords again last month, just like they did in 2022. The most similar service is 1Password. If you like LastPass, you'll like 1Password about the same, but 1Password hasn't had multiple terrible security breaches.
That's the most annoying thing about password managers, and a major reason I still don't use them: there exists no password manager that is cross-platform (desktop/mobile in particular), local-first, and isn't sketchy or enshittified or otherwise on HN's current "don't use it, use <whatever> instead" list.
For core security tool class, that doesn't inspire confidence.
I think Bitwarden is on HN's current happy list. (I just use Apple iCloud myself.)
Allowing passkeys to be exported to a plaintext file undermines the phishing protections, at least somewhat. It’s possible to trick you into exporting your passkeys from Bitwarden and sending the file to an attacker.
The major password managers say that this is the reason they don’t allow exporting passkeys, and it’s not false, but they’re also making it harder to switch password managers, which may be their ulterior motive. (You can’t even import those exported passkey files into any of the major password managers, which they would be incentivized to do, if those smaller players had significant marketshare.)
It’s up to you to decide whether protecting yourself from being tricked into exporting your passkeys is worth sacrificing your ability to read them.
Quite complicated to get it all setup (definitely not for non-technical users), but both are GPL and I now have all my passwords available with hardware protection (yubikey on desktop, secure enclave on iOS) in all locations.
[1] To be more accurate, although it was always proprietary, 1Password was also local-only at first, with syncing only supported by putting it on something like Dropbox. They only added native cloud syncing later and eventually made it cloud-first.
I've used pwsafe for years now. I think it checks off all your boxes. Works on desktop and mobile. Local-first but allows cloud if you really want to. No ads or enshittification. Bonus: Open Source. Other Bonus: Not owned by BigTech or LittleTechThatValuesMonetizationOverSecurity
I had the same frustration, I ended up with Keepass, the store is a open spec db[0] that has several clients, I use it across windows, android, and Linux without any issue and just sync with your favorite file sync tool.
The big risk with passkeys is storing the passkey where it will be held hostage. Don't store it in most single-ecosystem devices like Apple. Bitwarden can export, and I think 1Password can as well.
Cool. So can I write down my passkey on a piece of paper and put it in a safe?
> you'll reset your passkey the same way you reset your password, probably with a "forgot my password" email
Cool. But what if I lose the passkey to my email account?
> and the passkey will be stored there and synchronized to all of your other devices
Cool. Surely backups and synchronization never fails.
> The weird part is that password managers provide no way for you to copy and paste your passkeys
Uh oh. So you are saying passkeys are not like passwords? Last time I checked, every password manager lets me copy and paste my passwords just in case.
> To present a passkey, you have to use a password manager
Uh oh. So you are saying passkeys are not like passwords, like at all? Last time I checked, I can just type in my password using a keyboard on all websites I visit.
> This makes it impossible to copy and paste your passkey to the wrong person
Uh oh. So it means I can't just give my password to a family member sitting in the opposite side of the room? Sorry mom, corporate has decided that you are trying to trick me.
> Major password managers don’t even allow you to export your passkeys to a file that you can read/backup yourself
Uh oh. So is there a registry of Major League Password Managers that are guaranteed to implement Corporate Strength Cybersecurity Measurements? Will I be blocked by services if I happen to have landed on a minor password manager?
It also, unfortunately, means it's not possible (via most passkey implementations) to back those passkeys up to paper. Which is quite unfortunate: backing up to paper is one of the most stable and human accessible ways of ensuring redundancy and continuity, an inevitable but also oft-ignored part of credential management.
Security folks would like to pretend "solving continuity" isn't a problem, or is a problem that doesn't need to be accessible.
Is writing down passwords something people do? I have countless passwords saved over >20 years and I don’t think I’ve ever recorded one to paper. I even checked a couple of popular password management solutions and they don’t seem to have “print” functionality.
Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.
I've written down one: the master password for my Keepass database, along with instructions on how to get to and open that file. It's in a 'open if I'm no longer alive' envelope.
Yes, it's pretty common.
The main feature of passkeys is that they can't be pasted into a website they shouldn't be pasted in to. That means you can't copy them, by design.
It's an impossible design. It's all just obfuscation, most of which is confusing to users.
[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
This is not true. There are device bound passkeys where the private key is stored in a HSM (TPM2.0, Android SE, or apple SE) instead of a hosted service (iCloud, Bitwarden.com). You can just add multiple Passkeys to a single site to have another backup device should your other one be unavailable.
If I have to go get the backup out of "secure" storage each time I want to add a new Passkey it's not really a backup.
The design should have allowed, even if it was just within only the purview of a single manufacturer, a method for the device to export an encrypted dump that could be reloaded onto a factory-new device. Heck, make it a value-added service that the manufacturer has to initiate and tie it to some real-world identity verification.
The idea of having to put backup devices in-hand regularly is a bad design.
Phone apps. get around this idiocy by backing-up the encrypted Passkeys to a hosted service.