It’s a great idea, and it could be awesome, but things are not being addressed. Or being handwaved as “we can address them later”. This recent discussion from last month (both the discussion in the linked github issue, and in the HN thread both including some key players in the PassKey system) is pretty telling: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698502
I remember reading the W3C or FIDO Alliance docs for passkeys and they talked about the exportability of them. I think they said that they shouldn’t be exportable.
I still don’t understand passkeys. What prevents someone else from using my passkey? Maybe I should just set one up to get a better idea of how they work.
Passkeys are like using a private key to log in. There are several ways it’s better:
Passwords can be stored improperly by a website leading it to be leaked
Passkeys never leave the device so a website being breached can never leak your passkey
The website only stores the public portion of the key which is useless to an attacker
Passkeys can only be stolen by attacking and breaching the device or password manager that holds it
Passwords can and often are reused across multiple sites so a single leaked password can compromise many sites
Passkeys are created for each site so an attacker would need to steal each one separately
Passwords can be phished by fooling a user into entering the password
Passkeys can’t be phished easily since it’s designed not to leave the device - if such an attack was found it could be patched in the browser / password manager. You can’t patch all password forms to stop phishing in the same way
If you’re familiar with ssh keys, it’s similar to that and why the top security recommendation for new servers is to disable passwords and use keys instead.
not exacly, if someone hack a site that has poor security they gonna have your password, it you put your passkey there, it’s useless, also people can’t see you writibg yoyr password if don’t write it
Yes, but a password is a shared secret. So both you and the person you are interacting with need the password and therefore it is more vulnerable. With a past key, only you have the private key and the company or service you are interacting with never has access to the secret. Basically, they encrypt a message to you using your public key and then your private key decrypts it and sends them a response back with the correct answer.
Add comment