I love passkeys. I love them being on my phone, requiring biometric authentication before unlocking. I just hate the vendor lock in that comes with it.
Does anyone know the state of the standard wrt this? I know that they planned on doing something about it, just haven't kept up.
I use Bitwarden to store my passkeys. Syncs to all my devices and just works. I have very few issues with it. Also for the truly paranoid, you can run the open-source back end on your own server if you want.
Can you export the passkeys to an importable form that your heirs can use to get into your accounts if you have passed away? Something that's sealed in an envelope inside a fire safe, for example?
Every vendor I see offering a solution has no documented export option at all. Yes, you can use the legacy method to login, but an authentication stream that is not used regularly is one that will break, or will ask for a factor that I no longer have access to (I wouldn't know this because I only use passkeys.)
I also expect that there will be sites that only accept passkeys eventually, even if the spec says you shoudln't.
It is my understanding that there is ongoing work to create an import/export standard, and that bitwarden is planning to support it. But also, you can give your heirs your bitwarden root password.
Giving out the root password is less than ideal. I would prefer that my heirs not have to lie about their identity. I’m not singling out bitwarden here. Most SaaS offerings do not think about these issues. Pretty much every system should have a way of delegating authority without requiring lies.
Yes. If you use a password manager like 1password you can print out the recovery slip and write your password on it. Then all of your passkeys will be accessible.
I think you missed the point. If I have a passkey in 1password how does it become my passkey? As in, a passkey I can freely read, redistribute, and store in platforms that are not 1password. This is a property of passwords but not of passkeys.
Today you can do that with open source password managers, and in the future there is a passkey portability specification coming to do passkey migrations between managers.
But in general it's a bad idea to have the passkeys just sitting around in text files so the current managers are largely designed around preventing the tech support scammer from instructing grandma to dump the passkeys and email it to them.
I can register my Yubikeys on account.google.com (and around the web, e.g., fastmail.com) as passkeys. If you visit the account security page[0] and enable "skip password when possible", then you can log in to Google with only a Yubikey-backed passkey.
If you have old Google creds on your Yubikey, you may have to first remove those creds from your account (because there are older and newer protocol choices, and with the old protocols enabled Google will not support passwordless login).
Multiple yubikeys are required if you would like to have backups; there is no syncing between keys.
This seems like a key failure point to me and why I've been a tad resistant[0]. If there isn't some form of automatic backup then I guarantee I will not have a sync when I need it the most.
There is a similar problem even in OTPs. I switched phones not too long ago and some OTPs didn't properly transfer. I actually lost some accounts due to this, luckily nothing critical (I checked critical things but it's easy to let other things slip). The problem is that registering a new OTP removes the old ones. In some cases I've used recovery codes and in others the codes failed. IDK if I used the wrong order or what, but I copy-paste them into bitwarden, and I expect this is typical behavior.
99% of the time everything works perfectly fine. But that 1% is a HUGE disruption. With keys, I would even be okay if I had to plug my main key into a dock to sync them. Not as good as a safe, but better than nothing. I feel like we're trying to design software safes like we design physical safes. But if you lose your combo to a physical safe you always have destructive means to get in. With digital, we seem to forget how common locksmiths are. Googling, numbers seem kinda low but I'm not in a big city and there are at least 4 that I pass by through my typical weekly driving. So it seems that this issue is prolific enough we need to better account for actual human behavior.
[0] Don't get me wrong, I love them but I'm not willing to not undermine them via OTP creds because I need some other way in.
> If there isn't some form of automatic backup then I guarantee I will not have a sync when I need it the most.
As I understand things, passkeys come in a few different varieties.
You can buy a yubikey if you want the credential tied to one specific physical device. Figure out your own backup strategy, such as spare yubikeys or printed recovery codes or whatever.
Or you can use apple/google/microsoft if you want your passkeys backed up to your cloud account. This means passkeys are basically the "Log In With Google" button, but with extra steps.
I feel sorry for you, but I've also experienced bugs in password managers that fail to sync plain old passwords.
I feel like if I must choose between a 99% reliable syncing solution, and a non-existent automatic syncing solution that requires manual syncing, I would still choose the latter for its mental simplicity.
My point is that we need to address and solve these issues. I agree with you, but if we dismiss them then they don't get solved. The best algorithms are useless if they're too complicated to use and can't fit the reality of an average user. Currently they are hard to maintain for technical users!
I don't think solving the syncing problem is as important as giving users clear expectations. The best way to teach passkeys to regular users is to use analogy. Consider the house key: the physical key that unlocks the front door of your house. You can have two keys on separate keychains so that you carry one of them and treat the other as a backup. But if your key is accidentally lost and potentially in the possession of a bad actor, you will want to change the lock on your front door. And if you do that, it is entirely your responsibility to change the keys on your other keychain.
You can also simply register all your devices individually as a passkey and login with any one of them. Part of the point of the passkey standard was that you can simply have your laptop/phone/etc. act as a Fido2 backed security key in its own right. So if you have multiple devices it's pretty easy to set them all up as your passkeys.
Eg. My Microsoft desktop, my Google phone, my Apple laptop all have passkeys setup individually that allow login to my various accounts such as my Google account.
So they aren't at all synced. They are all from different vendors but they can all login since i set them all up as passkeys. It's easy to do this too. Setup one site for passkey login via phone, go to that site on your desktop and select "auth via phone passkey" and use the phone passkey and then once logged in on the desktop go to account setup and select "Create a passkey on this device". The end result is you have multiple hardware security keys, namely your phone, desktop and laptop.
The NxM problem is at least better than the other problem where a website or app requires at most one passkey. WeChat (which is basically required if you need to talk to business associates or friends in mainland China) simply does not support multiple passkeys.
For myself it's really only the Google/Apple/MS accounts i'm using with passkeys so far (and third party sign in/chrome password syncing for the smaller sites) so N is small right now.
Hopefully better syncing comes soon but i'm ok with the current situation for now.
It seems like the obvious endgame is most people will use very strong auth between their devices and Google / Microsoft / Apple and then federate to everything else. All other workflows will become niche because it's not in monopoly interests to build features that make anything else convenient or manageable.
This is where the incentives push and is why we're unlikely to see usable or easy passkey sync.
I'm sort of ok with this (it will be a net security improvement) but it saddens me a little to see more of the web come under centralised control.
Most people won't fully understand the implications of this, which will be that the right law enforcement request will instantly unlock every service you have access to regardless of jurisdiction.
Plus lots of secondary effects relating to fed auth providers having increasing leverage over the web in general.
> the right law enforcement request will instantly unlock every service you have access to regardless of jurisdiction.
You are conflating the old model of "log in with Google" and the new model of Google syncing your passkeys in an E2E way. The latter is more resistant to law enforcement misuse (not 100%, see All Writs Act in the San Bernardino shooter case).
It's a slightly nuanced discussion because in practice today, email provider is regarded as ultimate source of truth regarding identity, except for high security domains e.g. where money is involved (banks, crypto) and it's economically viable for recovery to be high touch.
So having access to a user's email is the first "golden key".
Second is OIDC / social logins.
Third would be passkeys / stored passwords / an unlocked device.
My guess about the future is that OIDC / social login will prove to scale and grow better than direct passkeys in most instances. It's a better, more fully developed model for thinking about and managing identity lifecycle, passkeys themselves are a low level primitive by comparison.
Users will understand it (social login) better, providers will support it better (partly because corporates don't have any way to centrally manage passkeys at scale, nor should they) and finally because of the fallback / recovery problem for sites using passkeys.
This scares me because I could get fully locked out if my house burns down or something. I like this property of a password manager. This seems to be in direct conflict with the design goals of passkeys.
Non-passkey based account access still works. As in i can go into my Google/Apple/MS account settings right now and in the security tab there's a ton of different options you can set.
Backup codes, sms phone recovery, alternate recovery email are all there in all of the above.
It's no different to forgetting your password/losing access to your password manager is it? As in i've literally at points lost access with passkeys (i only had 1 at the time) and the way i got back in was very straightforward and no different to losing access to a password manager. I got an email and typed my old password and i got back in and re-setup my passkeys.
If I lose access to my password manager, I'd be substantially boned. But I'm less worried about that. It would require me to forget my password, or 1password to get pwned, go bad, or lose data.
The way I assess risk, that's less likely to happen than I am to lose my passkeys.
If I'm using passkeys but can recover my account with SMS, then why am I using passkeys? That sounds like the weak link of security. I'd rather use passwords, where I can understand what the password consists of rather than passkeys if I'm not getting an increase in security.
Account recovery with the big providers that support passkeys is two factor from what i've experienced, eg. sms+email, email+old password or sms+recovery code etc. so definitely a step up from password login.
Many password managers these days support passkeys and can synchronize them in whatever way you use to also sync your passwords (i.e. a cloud backend, but also a self-hosted Syncthing shared folder etc.)
I can easily export and import my passwords from my password managers and do whatever I want with them. I enjoy having that lever over my subscription.
There are several subscription-free password managers available that support passkeys, e.g. Bitwarden (self-hosted), Strongbox (lifetime version available), or KeepassXC.
It's unfortunately not quite the same level of portability as passwords, as I don't think there's any standardized export/import format yet, but these options are significantly better than Apples's and Google's closed ecosystems.
I tried setting this up for a non-technical friend who was gifted multiple brand new Yubikeys. The goal is to log in to Google using any one of the Yubikeys with no password. Unfortunately doing so causes Chrome to pop up a dialog requesting a PIN for the Yubikey. How did you solve that problem?
Searching online I found an answer on Stack Overflow stating that a PIN is required in this case: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79471904 How did you bypass it? I also find it idiotic that it is required. A PIN is just a password in another name, so we are back to using Yubikeys as the second factor in 2FA rather than a password replacement.
Passkeys need to have two factor to count as a passkey per the standard. Otherwise in theory someone could steal your key alone and get in (a big risk).
You need to buy a newer Yubikey with biometrics to make this work. I assume you have an older Yubikey and Google is getting to the standard by asking for a PIN.
I have a https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-bio-series/ and it works with Google exactly like you want it to, no PIN required. It's completely understandable to require a PIN if you don't have one of these though.
The FIDO Alliance (who wrote the WebAuthn spec with the W3C) has a draft specification for a format (Credential Exchange Format) and protocol (Credential Exchange Protocol) for migrating passkeys and other credentials [1]. I don't think this is implemented by any providers yet, but it's being worked on.
On Android, Keepass2Android developer is working on supporting passkeys in the near future (https://github.com/PhilippC/keepass2android/issues/2099) but I'll be honest, I haven't dedicated enough time learning about passkeys to be sure the app will be able to support all implementations of passkeys and avoid vendor locking completely.
I always ask how you expect to defeat the vendor lock in?
Effectively you have a secret that you are using to authenticate yourself. With pass keys managed by a vendor, you are trusting that vendor to manage your secret. If they are able to give your secret to someone else, then they can no longer confirm who all knows your secret.
I'm sure you can come up with a protocol where you can fan out access to the secret in a way that requires fanning back messages to you. But I don't see any clear way to do so that doesn't increase the communication burden on everyone.
I'm also sure smarter people than me can surprise me with something, here. But secrets that can be shared historically tend to not be secrets for long.
> I'm sure you can come up with a protocol where you can fan out access to the secret in a way that requires fanning back messages to you. But I don't see any clear way to do so that doesn't increase the communication burden on everyone.
the spec actually supports this, it's called caBLE
Right, that flow seems somewhat straight forward and is roughly what I had in mind with my sentence. It doesn't really break you out of vendor involvement, though? You both still have to be fully in on the whole flow. Right?
Asked differently, how does this get a vendor out of the picture?
I actually thought it was more for mediating confirmation of access to them. You don't share the secret with the new party, but you and the vendor both do a flow with them to confirm that someone claiming to be an identity can support that claim.
For me, the only thing that makes passkeys viable is backing them up in the cloud and automatically syncing them across devices. Otherwise, I do not trust them.
Not the parent, but the obvious answer is: a hard token (e.g. Yubikey). After all passkeys are just a software emulation of the smart card / FIDO2 mechanism that's been around for many years.
The issue with hard tokens is that there is only one of them. By design, you can't back up a Yubikey's content to a second token. This means that any time you add 2FA to a new account, you must have all of your hard tokens in your possession to enroll them. This means a "one token on your keyring for daily use, one token in a safety deposit box as backup" approach isn't possible.
Yubico did propose a potential solution five years ago[0], but that proposal seems to have gone nowhere. Until something like that gets implemented, FIDO2 (and by extension Passkeys) requires some form software implementation backed by cloud synchronization to actually be usable for the average person.
It works well enough. When you need to signup for a new service on the go, you can add your backup key when you get to it. Having the backup key in a safety deposit box hardly accessible seems like a non-goal given you protect it with a pin with a very limited number of retries.
> When you need to signup for a new service on the go, you can add your backup key when you get to it
Good on paper, bad in practice.
Requires you to remember doing that each and every time. Incidentally this isn't that different from just grabbing your keys like the parent suggested. Only it introduces a new variable: time delay. A lot can happen in that time and we all know the reality is that even a diligent person is going to slip now and then. It surely isn't a reasonable expectation for an average person.
I'm not sure if this is satire. You trust the "cloud" and whatever does the syncing to the cloud? I definitely don't trust anything that "syncs to the cloud".
I read their comment to be “I trust myself to lose a hardware key, but not a software key that’s backed up and synced across all my devices.”
That’s one way to look at it: passkeys are just a more convenient form of authentication compared to passwords. Although in my mind you’re arguably not achieving a whole lot considering the security bottle neck is still the same, being the login to your password manager.
I use physical Yubikeys so I’m a bit out of the loop here, but are there any methods for protecting your root password to your password manager in this scenario?
Sure, why not? The cloud is just somebody else's computer, and if I don't trust that somebody to not take a peek, I'll make sure to encrypt my data first.
Passkeys are highly phishing resistant in a way that passwords are not and are not subject to credential reuse (though password managers somewhat solve the first problem and almost entirely solve the latter problem.)
In effect, though, 1Password is both something you have (the device with 1P logged in, login requires a Security Key that you don't memorize) and something you know (the master password) or are (typically biometrics can be used to unlock for a period after entering the master password.)
No. The service you are logging in to does not hold the keys so they can't be leaked, passkeys do not get reused between services, it's effectively impossible to fall for phishing attacks with passkeys, and it's effectively impossible to fall for scammers trying to get your keys since there isn't any mechanism to directly dump the private keys out.
Pretty much all the problems related to passwords are solved by passkeys, having them synced between your devices does not impact that.
A passkey is a public-private keypair strongly tied to a specific site. Sites never have access to the private key, and the key will never be presented for use on the wrong site. Those two advantages remain even if the passkey is stored in software or synced over the cloud.
That's my impression as well, and the nature of computing today /encourages/ putting passkeys into some container that means that they can be accessed from other pieces of hardware at different locations.
Can you expand on the vendor lock aspect? I have stored passkeys in my password manager, so they feel pretty portable to me. Is it that each service requires a unique passkey? That seems comparable to how each service would require its own TOTP seed.
> we have no interest in creating a walled garden or locking you into 1Password.
They have no interest... in collecting subscription fees? I'm a satisfied 1Password customer, but it's hard to take this claim seriously. What does it mean? They literally get paid. Isn't that the definition of an interest?
KeepassXC lets you export the private key, which you can then back up or import into another KeepassXC instance. I have tested this, it works. I even shipped my exported private key off to a friend in another state and he was able to import it into a KeepassXC instance and log in to my account. Presumably another password manager could support importing the data, as it's just plaintext, though I don't know if any do.
Unfortunately the spec authors think this export feature violates the spec and have threatened KeepassXC with being banned by authenticating websites[1]. This explicit support from the spec authors for client banning makes passkeys non-viable to me. The websites I log in to should not be able to restrict what clients I choose to use to manage my own data.
[1] Spec author writes, "To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties. ... (RPs [may] block you, something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations)." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
Just having the data exported is peace of mind for me. It's trivial to import or convert to another format (even if not implemented now), so the worst-case scenario is acceptable, especially considering how much better Bitwarden + Passkeys are to every other form of authentication.
> But how can websites know whether its users are using secure authenticators? Authenticators can cryptographically prove certain facts about their origins, like who manufactured it, by generating an attestation statement when the user creates a passkey; this statement is backed by a certificate chain signed by the manufacturer.
How many scummy companies trot out "Let me protect you from yourself" to justify taking away their users' freedoms?
> Does anyone know the state of the standard wrt this?
Exporting/transporting keys seems to be optional on the part of implementors, but my solution has been to use Bitwarden, so I at least get cross platform keys.
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much to help with vendor lock in directly (like, you may or may not be able to export the private key(s) depending on the tool, and in some cases it’s definitely not possible like with a hardware key), but any website that supports passkeys supports WebAuthn in general so you shouldn’t have difficulty migrating to another tool if desired, although you would need to register again.
Passkeys support an attestation anti-feature, enshrined in the spec. This feature can be abused (and will be IMO, why put it in the spec otherwise?) to limit which providers can access a service. Lock-in is built into the design.
One of the developers already threatened to use it against keepass when they built an export feature he didn't agree with.
Attestation is probably the best feature of passkeys.
From a corporate compliance perspective, I need to ensure that employee keys are stored in a FIPS-compliant TPM and unexportable. Key loss is not an issue because we have, ya know, an IT department. The only way I can ensure this happens is by whitelisting AAGUIDs and enforcing attestation.
With these factors I can also get out of the MFA hellhole (because I can prove that whitelisted vendor X already performs MFA on-device without me having to manage it: for example, WHFB requires something you have (keys in your TPM) and either something you are (face scan / fingerprint) or something you know (PIN), without me having to store/verify any of those factors or otherwise manage them). Same goes for passkeys stored in MS Authenticator on iOS/Android.
This is fine for corporate settings, where the data is not owned by the user but by the company. But it's completely unacceptable for managing one's own personal account. What do I do if I do not trust proprietary software to manage my ability to log in to online services? How can this be compatible with open source passkey providers?
The spec failing to distinguish between these two cases is a major flaw and completely kills passkey viability for personal accounts until they resolve it.
Apple has stated very publicly and in multiple places/ways that Consumer Passkeys will never include attestation data on Apple hardware. That's not "the spec", but it is still currently a big enough moat to protect Consumer usage of passkeys away from Corporate needs, given most Consumer apps/websites probably want iOS/iPadOS/macOS (in decreasing interest) users today.
On the technical side of limitations of attestation for consumer Passkeys (due to iCloud Keychain sync):
> Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.
> Attestation was designed to attest to a specific device, exclusively at the point of creation, with a specific set of security properties. It doesn't make sense for synced credentials for a number of reasons, including syncing to devices with different security properties, changes in security properties that happen after key creation, security properties of the sync fabric, sharing the passkey, or exporting to other passkey providers. We're working hard with W3C and FIDO to solve these problems.
(I believe some of the problems being solved in that one in 2022 is referring to how we got the "uvi" and "uvm" extensions to Passkeys, neither of which is in attestation data nor attested in any way, and both designed for a general semblance of user privacy: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-1/#sctn-uvi-extension)
I believe the juiciest quotes I'm looking for are buried in WWDC videos and I can't find a transcript search tool just yet.
> Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.
On any platform, attestation and "syncing" are effectively opposites. Either you're getting attestation that the auth comes from a secure application and on secure hardware (read: non-exportable in-TPM crypto material), or not.
As usual, it's a tug-of-war between security and convenience.
Attestation is only about security if there are ways for people to handle it themselves. Think of them like certs where anyone can buy one or get one for free using lets-encrypt. I should be able to attest my own keys in a similar way. If I cannot then they are not really about security but about control and lock-in.
None of the common passkey implementations support attestation.
Apple doesn't support it at all anymore; Google only supports it for non-synchronized credentials (which are arguably not passkeys). Bitwarden obviously doesn't either (it can't, as a pure software implementation).
> One of the developers already threatened to use it against keepass when they built an export feature he didn't agree with.
Developer of what? There's no competing software solution that supports attestation, and hardware authenticators complement software ones, rather than compete with them.
> Passkeys support an attestation anti-feature, enshrined in the spec. This feature can be abused (and will be IMO, why put it in the spec otherwise?) to limit which providers can access a service.
The problem is that Passkeys really conflate two separate feature sets:
1. Synchronized password replacements. They _have_ to be represented as accessible clear-text to be synced between devices, at least during transit. So they can be stolen, for example, by malware that scans RAM for keys.
2. Keys that never leave a hardened hardware devices. Since they never leave the device, they can't be synced. But they're completely secure.
This is largely a problem because the specification does not cleanly call these out as two completely different feature sets, e.g. via "profiles" or a similar mechanism.
Effectively implementations already do that, and the spec could clear things up a lot by clearly defining one profile for synchronizing, non-attestation-capable, discoverable credentials called "passkeys", and another for hardware-backed, non-exportable, attestation-supporting ones called something else.
It derives all keypairs from a passphrase, and rederives the private key from the key handle, similar to "stateless" hardware authenticators.
Please don't use it for anything important – it's a fundamentally bad idea, similar to "brain wallets"; I only implemented it to figure out whether it was possible, and to improve my own understanding of the WebAuthN and FIDO specifications.
If you then purchased passkeys that supported a custom seed, you could then replicate this seed to as many keys as you needed.
There are always security tradeoffs, but this was a mechanism to store something in the real world that had about 115 bits of entropy, as 'Something you know'
This is a really common question but it has a really simple answer. They still have recovery methods. You can optionally change these with most providers (go into account settings, setup something like a recovery codes and check the option to be completely passwordless) but regardless they still have recovery methods. As in i lost my phone and i recovered the account with a combination of my secondary email and old password.
You might argue "but if they still have the recovery methods isn't my account only as secure as those" and to that i'd point out that you're still way ahead with passkeys simply by not entering passwords on a routine basis. The recovery methods tend to be two factor as well, just without passkeys as one of the two factors (hence email+password) so still a win over password alone in any case.
Passkeys should be thought of as no different to the old two factor authenticators. I mean that's literally what they are, essentially the latest fido standard that allows devices such as your phone to be a hardware security key in its own right. These always had ways to do account recovery with all the providers.
You can use the same passkey for multiple devices (for example with keepassxc as authenticator that handles them), but it reduces security same as for example with using ssh private key that's not unique per device.
And you need to register for every new service you create an account with.
It's also not a good idea to store the backup at home – house fires are unfortunately a thing, and chances are you might not have time to grab either your main or your backup key.
Somewhat off-topic: Does anyone know the underlying strength of the keys used as the "root of trust" behind passkey synchronization on Android/iOS? I can't find a lot of documentation on this.
It seems like they're synced between devices using client-side encryption, with keys derived from your phone's lock code (typically only 4-6 digits). Is it possible that the passkeys are fully random, but then encrypted with far less than 128/256 bits of actual entropy while being synchronized between devices?
Could it be possible to brute force the keys server-side (IIUC, derived from 4-6 digit pins) with non-excessive amounts of compute? What am I missing?
A confidential channel can be established over an insecure medium using e.g. Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
To protect against MITM, an out-of-band QR/bluetooth can be used.
Typically you see symmetric encryption keys (AES-256 is the most common), derived from a Password KDF. I don't know what Google or Apple do specifically, but that'd be my first guess.
I've got no overall stats but they are very well integrated in to iOS. You could end up using them without really even knowing what passkeys are. Websites and apps just prompt you with "add a passkey" and if you hit accept you get one and it gets synced to all your other Apple devices and just works.
1Password and BitWarden both support Passkey sync across all three OSes. Though if you are using Android regularly enough that may imply you trust Google implicitly enough that you probably could also just get away with Chrome Passkey sync which I'm told also works on all three OSes today.
Or treat it as an opportunity to try to avoid "vendor lock-in"/increase redundancy by using all three to have 3+ passkeys in every service. Windows 11 can act as useful a bridge for bootstrapping all of your keys into a service: register for a site first on iOS or Android, use Windows 11 bluetooth to login via the first passkey, add a Windows passkey, and use Windows 11 bluetooth again to add the third. (Or some combo of that with the Windows iCloud Passwords app and/or Chrome.)
KeepassXC is a good client that lets you handle your data how you want. I wrote a pro-Passkey blog post here[1] that explains how to do your own syncing, though I later discovered Passkeys are explicitly built to support proprietary software vendor lock in and had to revoke my support. If you are concerned about being able to control your own data outside of the big tech ecosystem, I strongly recommend avoiding passkeys entirely. It is possible for now, but they are not built for that and the spec authors are actively hostile to you managing your own data.
I also meant to mention that many Keepass clients support Passkeys already today. Strongbox on iOS and macOS has similar or better integration to 1Password/BitWarden. Windows you probably want KeepassXC for now as it isn't fully baked in mainline Keepass. I don't know what you'd use on Android today, but I'm sure there's at least one and probably more on the way.
Bitwarden is free, and if you are concerned about these terms changing, the excellent self-hosted open source server implementation "vaultwarden" [1] supports passkeys as well.
Because the browser knows the internet domain that the login/registration is for. And the browser also provides the JavaScript API to talk to the authenticator (navigator.credentials.create and navigator.credentials.get).
Is there a "platform authenticator" that allows import/export of the actual origin site, keypair, and credential id in plaintext? The next would be a variety of platform authenticators able to import and use those?
I don't want vendor lockin and I don't want proprietary third party cloud based backup/recovery.
Today with totp, I store the plaintext otpauth url and I can use oathtool to spit out codes when needed on my desktop. My phone has aegis, but I don't use any cloud based backup/recovery. I switched from Google Authenticator after they implemented their cloud based syncing to google.
KeepassXC allows this, but the spec authors think this is bad and have threatened KeepassXC with being banned by authenticating websites. The spec has explicit support for banning clients built in. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
Some open source password managers provide this, but the general industry is working on a way to transfer between hosts without having to dump everything out in plain text in between.
Challenge-response with asymmetric encryption is pretty much perfect. I wish all auth worked like SSH.
Passkeys kind of take that concept, but make it suck. No backups. Terrible interoperability.
The other day I attempted to create one on my Mac with Firefox. The system passkey popup came up and made me scan a QR code with my iPhone that had to be connected to the internet. Bitwarden (my iOS passkey manager, that part works well) did open, but after selecting the profile to create the passkey in, it errored out. No passkey for me.
I implemented passkeys @ $WORK, and we rolled it out to our tech department only first. Nobody could make it work reliably, and troubleshooting it was basically impossible. The best you could do was just wipe their passkeys and have them try again.
I've since disabled passkey support and we have no plans to attempt a new rollout anytime soon.
As far as I can tell the only people that have "successfully" rolled out passkeys are the companies with effectively zero user support and they just refuse to support passkeys at all, so if they don't work for a particular user: whatever.
TOTP is fully rolled out and well supported. Troubleshooting it is "hard", but at least it's possible.
TOTP troubleshooting basically boils down to 3 things:
* Server time
* User Phone/device time(most users opt to use their phone to generate TOTP, but we don't care)
* More than one TOTP saved for a given site(i.e. they didn't replace the old and created a new TOTP shared key) or not saved at all.
Our tech/user support helpdesk can handle this but it took a lot of training. We built special tools. We still get requests from them when they get overwhelmed with the complexity.
Passkey troubleshooting:
* Mobile network, including bluetooth
* Server network connectivity
* Computer/device network, including BT connectivity to mobile device.
Most tech support can't handle that much complexity at once. Shoot, most developers and tech "whiz" people can't either. The error messages one does get, if they are lucky, are very general and not helpful at all(last I checked).
Passkeys are not currently fit for production where you have to support the users. I hope they get there.
1Password is the only client/device implementation of Passkeys that pretty much just works. It saves the passkey in the 1p vault, and the 1p vault can be synced across devices.
It's something else that is unrelated to your password that you have to provide in order to log in, is that not the definition of a factor of authentication ?
Passwords are "something you know". TOTP is "something you know". It wanted to be "something you have", but it's not. Proof: I can put TOTP tokens into my password manager now. Anything that can go into my password manager is proved to be "something I know" by the fact I can put it into my password manager.
Incidentally, passkeys go into my password manager too. You can probably work the math from there.
(I'm heterodox on this matter, though. I don't believe in the existence of "things you are" and "things you have". I think it's all ultimately just "things you know" and it's all better analyzed in terms of the cost of knowing and proving knowledge, and that the 3-factor framework for authentication is wrong.)
FWIW, I migrated to ed25519-sk SSH keys backed by FIDO2 credentials on my Yubikeys, and I really love it. The fact that my credentials effectively can never be lifted out of my hardware key is quite comforting.
I haven't had any problems with syncing and using passkeys with 1Password and Firefox on MacOS, iOS, or Windows. When the site wants to create or use a passkey I get a prompt from 1Password on the device that I'm using. No need to involve a second device (which for me I'm fine with security-wise. If I really wanted to be sure there was no way of malware extracting the keys I would be using my Yubikeys)
I remember those QR codes and needing to use my phone when I tried passkeys a couple years ago when I was on an older Mac that didn't have hardware support for biometrics.
Every since I got a Mac with that support passkey creation has worked fine entirely on the Mac.
Passwords and password managers seem good enough to me, and TOTP support is everywhere now.
Passkeys just feel like a standard written by large tech companies as a flywheel technology to keep me locked into whatever hardware and software ecosystem I'm already in since seemingly no one besides maybe Bitwarden supports exporting them. Which seems pointless, because I don't know of any platform that supports importing them.
I am also getting tired of corporate white knight nerds defending trillion dollar companies telling me that portability isn't a concern.
Password/TOTP does not protect you against phishing. The phishing site can forward the password and TOTP you type into the real system, gaining your access.
FIDO/WebAuthn/Passkeys protect you against phishing, because of the origin binding mentioned in the article. On the phishing site, the required credential cannot be generated, and so no matter how convincing it is you can't accidentally give them a credential to forward.
Phishing is what these systems were trying to defend against.
Now if you were to say that the move from plain FIDO tied to a hardware key to passkeys tied to a Google account was a lock-in ploy ---- then I might be more inclined to agree.
Considering there's an entire portion of the software industry built on accepting a user's credentials and also prompting them for their TOTP, I don't think this really matters.
It's not an acceptable trade-off. And the answer isn't, "Those third-parties shouldn't be asking for your password and TOTP," because that's not a realistic premise.
> The phishing site can forward the password and TOTP you type into the real system, gaining your access.
To me this seems harder to pull off than a fraudulent password reset (either via social engineering, or a hacked email account). My TOTP fell in the drink a few years back, and some accounts very hard to reset and others were too easy.
If you're targeting a particular person, social engineering is probably easier. If you just want to illicitly harvest some accounts, and aren't too worried about which ones, blasting out emails linking to hacked websites that fake the login & TOTP flow is very easy.
A couple years ago there were several posts here about not using PassKeys, and I went along with that for a bit. But I’ve fallen in love with them. They’re so nice to use with 1Password.
I suppose I might want to stop using 1Password someday, but it still has all my passwords as well so I can just fallback to those. And, honestly, only a fraction of the sites I have in 1Password have PassKeys available.
What I hate much more is sites that don’t have passwords and require you to log in via email every time. It drives me NUTS.
Passkeys are honestly the most frictionless system. No more waiting for 2FA codes and having to type them in. No more getting locked out of your accounts if you lose your phone.
Passkeys are an API that requires the use of a password manager. It doesn’t lock you into any hardware any more than your password manager does already.
You can’t copy a passkey to a different password manager, but you can create a new one for the same account, which is usually just as good.
I love passkeys. I love them being on my phone, requiring biometric authentication before unlocking. I just hate the vendor lock in that comes with it.
Does anyone know the state of the standard wrt this? I know that they planned on doing something about it, just haven't kept up.
I use Bitwarden to store my passkeys. Syncs to all my devices and just works. I have very few issues with it. Also for the truly paranoid, you can run the open-source back end on your own server if you want.
https://bitwarden.com/passwordless-passkeys/
Can you export the passkeys to an importable form that your heirs can use to get into your accounts if you have passed away? Something that's sealed in an envelope inside a fire safe, for example?
Every vendor I see offering a solution has no documented export option at all. Yes, you can use the legacy method to login, but an authentication stream that is not used regularly is one that will break, or will ask for a factor that I no longer have access to (I wouldn't know this because I only use passkeys.)
I also expect that there will be sites that only accept passkeys eventually, even if the spec says you shoudln't.
It is my understanding that there is ongoing work to create an import/export standard, and that bitwarden is planning to support it. But also, you can give your heirs your bitwarden root password.
Giving out the root password is less than ideal. I would prefer that my heirs not have to lie about their identity. I’m not singling out bitwarden here. Most SaaS offerings do not think about these issues. Pretty much every system should have a way of delegating authority without requiring lies.
Yes. If you use a password manager like 1password you can print out the recovery slip and write your password on it. Then all of your passkeys will be accessible.
I think you missed the point. If I have a passkey in 1password how does it become my passkey? As in, a passkey I can freely read, redistribute, and store in platforms that are not 1password. This is a property of passwords but not of passkeys.
Today you can do that with open source password managers, and in the future there is a passkey portability specification coming to do passkey migrations between managers.
But in general it's a bad idea to have the passkeys just sitting around in text files so the current managers are largely designed around preventing the tech support scammer from instructing grandma to dump the passkeys and email it to them.
I can register my Yubikeys on account.google.com (and around the web, e.g., fastmail.com) as passkeys. If you visit the account security page[0] and enable "skip password when possible", then you can log in to Google with only a Yubikey-backed passkey.
If you have old Google creds on your Yubikey, you may have to first remove those creds from your account (because there are older and newer protocol choices, and with the old protocols enabled Google will not support passwordless login).
Multiple yubikeys are required if you would like to have backups; there is no syncing between keys.
For support matrices, see [1].
[0]: https://myaccount.google.com/security
[1]: https://passkeys.dev/device-support/
There is a similar problem even in OTPs. I switched phones not too long ago and some OTPs didn't properly transfer. I actually lost some accounts due to this, luckily nothing critical (I checked critical things but it's easy to let other things slip). The problem is that registering a new OTP removes the old ones. In some cases I've used recovery codes and in others the codes failed. IDK if I used the wrong order or what, but I copy-paste them into bitwarden, and I expect this is typical behavior.
99% of the time everything works perfectly fine. But that 1% is a HUGE disruption. With keys, I would even be okay if I had to plug my main key into a dock to sync them. Not as good as a safe, but better than nothing. I feel like we're trying to design software safes like we design physical safes. But if you lose your combo to a physical safe you always have destructive means to get in. With digital, we seem to forget how common locksmiths are. Googling, numbers seem kinda low but I'm not in a big city and there are at least 4 that I pass by through my typical weekly driving. So it seems that this issue is prolific enough we need to better account for actual human behavior.
[0] Don't get me wrong, I love them but I'm not willing to not undermine them via OTP creds because I need some other way in.
> If there isn't some form of automatic backup then I guarantee I will not have a sync when I need it the most.
As I understand things, passkeys come in a few different varieties.
You can buy a yubikey if you want the credential tied to one specific physical device. Figure out your own backup strategy, such as spare yubikeys or printed recovery codes or whatever.
Or you can use apple/google/microsoft if you want your passkeys backed up to your cloud account. This means passkeys are basically the "Log In With Google" button, but with extra steps.
I feel sorry for you, but I've also experienced bugs in password managers that fail to sync plain old passwords.
I feel like if I must choose between a 99% reliable syncing solution, and a non-existent automatic syncing solution that requires manual syncing, I would still choose the latter for its mental simplicity.
My point is that we need to address and solve these issues. I agree with you, but if we dismiss them then they don't get solved. The best algorithms are useless if they're too complicated to use and can't fit the reality of an average user. Currently they are hard to maintain for technical users!
I don't think solving the syncing problem is as important as giving users clear expectations. The best way to teach passkeys to regular users is to use analogy. Consider the house key: the physical key that unlocks the front door of your house. You can have two keys on separate keychains so that you carry one of them and treat the other as a backup. But if your key is accidentally lost and potentially in the possession of a bad actor, you will want to change the lock on your front door. And if you do that, it is entirely your responsibility to change the keys on your other keychain.
You can also simply register all your devices individually as a passkey and login with any one of them. Part of the point of the passkey standard was that you can simply have your laptop/phone/etc. act as a Fido2 backed security key in its own right. So if you have multiple devices it's pretty easy to set them all up as your passkeys.
Eg. My Microsoft desktop, my Google phone, my Apple laptop all have passkeys setup individually that allow login to my various accounts such as my Google account.
So they aren't at all synced. They are all from different vendors but they can all login since i set them all up as passkeys. It's easy to do this too. Setup one site for passkey login via phone, go to that site on your desktop and select "auth via phone passkey" and use the phone passkey and then once logged in on the desktop go to account setup and select "Create a passkey on this device". The end result is you have multiple hardware security keys, namely your phone, desktop and laptop.
My issue with this is the NxM problem, if you want to do this on 10 websites with 5 devices you need to maintain 50 passkeys.
The NxM problem is at least better than the other problem where a website or app requires at most one passkey. WeChat (which is basically required if you need to talk to business associates or friends in mainland China) simply does not support multiple passkeys.
For myself it's really only the Google/Apple/MS accounts i'm using with passkeys so far (and third party sign in/chrome password syncing for the smaller sites) so N is small right now.
Hopefully better syncing comes soon but i'm ok with the current situation for now.
It seems like the obvious endgame is most people will use very strong auth between their devices and Google / Microsoft / Apple and then federate to everything else. All other workflows will become niche because it's not in monopoly interests to build features that make anything else convenient or manageable.
This is where the incentives push and is why we're unlikely to see usable or easy passkey sync.
I'm sort of ok with this (it will be a net security improvement) but it saddens me a little to see more of the web come under centralised control.
Most people won't fully understand the implications of this, which will be that the right law enforcement request will instantly unlock every service you have access to regardless of jurisdiction.
Plus lots of secondary effects relating to fed auth providers having increasing leverage over the web in general.
> the right law enforcement request will instantly unlock every service you have access to regardless of jurisdiction.
You are conflating the old model of "log in with Google" and the new model of Google syncing your passkeys in an E2E way. The latter is more resistant to law enforcement misuse (not 100%, see All Writs Act in the San Bernardino shooter case).
Yep, I agree good outcomes are possible.
It's a slightly nuanced discussion because in practice today, email provider is regarded as ultimate source of truth regarding identity, except for high security domains e.g. where money is involved (banks, crypto) and it's economically viable for recovery to be high touch.
So having access to a user's email is the first "golden key".
Second is OIDC / social logins.
Third would be passkeys / stored passwords / an unlocked device.
My guess about the future is that OIDC / social login will prove to scale and grow better than direct passkeys in most instances. It's a better, more fully developed model for thinking about and managing identity lifecycle, passkeys themselves are a low level primitive by comparison.
Users will understand it (social login) better, providers will support it better (partly because corporates don't have any way to centrally manage passkeys at scale, nor should they) and finally because of the fallback / recovery problem for sites using passkeys.
This scares me because I could get fully locked out if my house burns down or something. I like this property of a password manager. This seems to be in direct conflict with the design goals of passkeys.
Non-passkey based account access still works. As in i can go into my Google/Apple/MS account settings right now and in the security tab there's a ton of different options you can set.
Backup codes, sms phone recovery, alternate recovery email are all there in all of the above.
It's no different to forgetting your password/losing access to your password manager is it? As in i've literally at points lost access with passkeys (i only had 1 at the time) and the way i got back in was very straightforward and no different to losing access to a password manager. I got an email and typed my old password and i got back in and re-setup my passkeys.
If I lose access to my password manager, I'd be substantially boned. But I'm less worried about that. It would require me to forget my password, or 1password to get pwned, go bad, or lose data.
The way I assess risk, that's less likely to happen than I am to lose my passkeys.
If I'm using passkeys but can recover my account with SMS, then why am I using passkeys? That sounds like the weak link of security. I'd rather use passwords, where I can understand what the password consists of rather than passkeys if I'm not getting an increase in security.
Account recovery with the big providers that support passkeys is two factor from what i've experienced, eg. sms+email, email+old password or sms+recovery code etc. so definitely a step up from password login.
Many password managers these days support passkeys and can synchronize them in whatever way you use to also sync your passwords (i.e. a cloud backend, but also a self-hosted Syncthing shared folder etc.)
I can easily export and import my passwords from my password managers and do whatever I want with them. I enjoy having that lever over my subscription.
There are several subscription-free password managers available that support passkeys, e.g. Bitwarden (self-hosted), Strongbox (lifetime version available), or KeepassXC.
It's unfortunately not quite the same level of portability as passwords, as I don't think there's any standardized export/import format yet, but these options are significantly better than Apples's and Google's closed ecosystems.
I've been using keypassxc which supports passkeys. It works for github at least
I just use a Trezor One (yes, a bitcoin hardware wallet).
I back up my 12 word seed phrase, and then I can restore any and all my TOTP/FIDO/passkeys with another one if needed.
I tried setting this up for a non-technical friend who was gifted multiple brand new Yubikeys. The goal is to log in to Google using any one of the Yubikeys with no password. Unfortunately doing so causes Chrome to pop up a dialog requesting a PIN for the Yubikey. How did you solve that problem?
Searching online I found an answer on Stack Overflow stating that a PIN is required in this case: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79471904 How did you bypass it? I also find it idiotic that it is required. A PIN is just a password in another name, so we are back to using Yubikeys as the second factor in 2FA rather than a password replacement.
Passkeys need to have two factor to count as a passkey per the standard. Otherwise in theory someone could steal your key alone and get in (a big risk).
You need to buy a newer Yubikey with biometrics to make this work. I assume you have an older Yubikey and Google is getting to the standard by asking for a PIN.
I have a https://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-bio-series/ and it works with Google exactly like you want it to, no PIN required. It's completely understandable to require a PIN if you don't have one of these though.
The FIDO Alliance (who wrote the WebAuthn spec with the W3C) has a draft specification for a format (Credential Exchange Format) and protocol (Credential Exchange Protocol) for migrating passkeys and other credentials [1]. I don't think this is implemented by any providers yet, but it's being worked on.
[1] https://fidoalliance.org/specifications-credential-exchange-...
On Android, Keepass2Android developer is working on supporting passkeys in the near future (https://github.com/PhilippC/keepass2android/issues/2099) but I'll be honest, I haven't dedicated enough time learning about passkeys to be sure the app will be able to support all implementations of passkeys and avoid vendor locking completely.
I always ask how you expect to defeat the vendor lock in?
Effectively you have a secret that you are using to authenticate yourself. With pass keys managed by a vendor, you are trusting that vendor to manage your secret. If they are able to give your secret to someone else, then they can no longer confirm who all knows your secret.
I'm sure you can come up with a protocol where you can fan out access to the secret in a way that requires fanning back messages to you. But I don't see any clear way to do so that doesn't increase the communication burden on everyone.
I'm also sure smarter people than me can surprise me with something, here. But secrets that can be shared historically tend to not be secrets for long.
> I'm sure you can come up with a protocol where you can fan out access to the secret in a way that requires fanning back messages to you. But I don't see any clear way to do so that doesn't increase the communication burden on everyone.
the spec actually supports this, it's called caBLE
Right, that flow seems somewhat straight forward and is roughly what I had in mind with my sentence. It doesn't really break you out of vendor involvement, though? You both still have to be fully in on the whole flow. Right?
Asked differently, how does this get a vendor out of the picture?
caBLE is not a specification for transferring secrets, but for mediating (temporary) access to them.
But the FIDO alliance is apparently working on that: https://fidoalliance.org/fido-alliance-publishes-new-specifi...
I actually thought it was more for mediating confirmation of access to them. You don't share the secret with the new party, but you and the vendor both do a flow with them to confirm that someone claiming to be an identity can support that claim.
For me, the only thing that makes passkeys viable is backing them up in the cloud and automatically syncing them across devices. Otherwise, I do not trust them.
What do you use?
Not the parent, but the obvious answer is: a hard token (e.g. Yubikey). After all passkeys are just a software emulation of the smart card / FIDO2 mechanism that's been around for many years.
This doesn't solve the problem, unfortunately.
The issue with hard tokens is that there is only one of them. By design, you can't back up a Yubikey's content to a second token. This means that any time you add 2FA to a new account, you must have all of your hard tokens in your possession to enroll them. This means a "one token on your keyring for daily use, one token in a safety deposit box as backup" approach isn't possible.
Yubico did propose a potential solution five years ago[0], but that proposal seems to have gone nowhere. Until something like that gets implemented, FIDO2 (and by extension Passkeys) requires some form software implementation backed by cloud synchronization to actually be usable for the average person.
[0]: https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-proposes-webauthn-protoco...
It works well enough. When you need to signup for a new service on the go, you can add your backup key when you get to it. Having the backup key in a safety deposit box hardly accessible seems like a non-goal given you protect it with a pin with a very limited number of retries.
Requires you to remember doing that each and every time. Incidentally this isn't that different from just grabbing your keys like the parent suggested. Only it introduces a new variable: time delay. A lot can happen in that time and we all know the reality is that even a diligent person is going to slip now and then. It surely isn't a reasonable expectation for an average person.
I have three: 1) local usage 2) local backup key 3) remote backup key
every few months I swap 2 and 3, and re-enroll any missing (kept track of with a spreadsheet)
quite annoying, offline enrollment would be considerably better
This is the way.
> Having the backup key in a safety deposit box hardly accessible seems like a non-goal
It's absolutely a goal, since a PIN doesn't prevent your security key from loss, theft, or physical destruction.
I keep it in a secure separate location in case my house catches on fire.
I'm not sure if this is satire. You trust the "cloud" and whatever does the syncing to the cloud? I definitely don't trust anything that "syncs to the cloud".
I read their comment to be “I trust myself to lose a hardware key, but not a software key that’s backed up and synced across all my devices.”
That’s one way to look at it: passkeys are just a more convenient form of authentication compared to passwords. Although in my mind you’re arguably not achieving a whole lot considering the security bottle neck is still the same, being the login to your password manager.
I use physical Yubikeys so I’m a bit out of the loop here, but are there any methods for protecting your root password to your password manager in this scenario?
> I definitely don't trust anything that "syncs to the cloud".
What if you lose your device? Do you install alternate passkeys in a second device? Do you have to do that for every site and service?
I use KeePassXC, and I have backups, if that counts, at least for passwords/passphrases and TOTP.
do you have offsite backups?
Probably not satire. He/she doesn't need you to trust it for them to use it.
Sure, why not? The cloud is just somebody else's computer, and if I don't trust that somebody to not take a peek, I'll make sure to encrypt my data first.
Many password managers do just that.
1Password integrates with all pass keys on my iPhone, my Mac, and my Linux box.
By a far and away WORTH the subscription, for me!
doesn't that mean your passkeys are now about as secure as a regular password?
Passkeys are highly phishing resistant in a way that passwords are not and are not subject to credential reuse (though password managers somewhat solve the first problem and almost entirely solve the latter problem.)
In effect, though, 1Password is both something you have (the device with 1P logged in, login requires a Security Key that you don't memorize) and something you know (the master password) or are (typically biometrics can be used to unlock for a period after entering the master password.)
No. The service you are logging in to does not hold the keys so they can't be leaked, passkeys do not get reused between services, it's effectively impossible to fall for phishing attacks with passkeys, and it's effectively impossible to fall for scammers trying to get your keys since there isn't any mechanism to directly dump the private keys out.
Pretty much all the problems related to passwords are solved by passkeys, having them synced between your devices does not impact that.
A passkey is a public-private keypair strongly tied to a specific site. Sites never have access to the private key, and the key will never be presented for use on the wrong site. Those two advantages remain even if the passkey is stored in software or synced over the cloud.
Don't know about you, but my passwords were already secure enough anyway.
That's my impression as well, and the nature of computing today /encourages/ putting passkeys into some container that means that they can be accessed from other pieces of hardware at different locations.
Can you expand on the vendor lock aspect? I have stored passkeys in my password manager, so they feel pretty portable to me. Is it that each service requires a unique passkey? That seems comparable to how each service would require its own TOTP seed.
Your password manager came from a vendor. As a thought exercise, switch vendors.
https://blog.1password.com/fido-alliance-import-export-passk...
> we have no interest in creating a walled garden or locking you into 1Password.
They have no interest... in collecting subscription fees? I'm a satisfied 1Password customer, but it's hard to take this claim seriously. What does it mean? They literally get paid. Isn't that the definition of an interest?
Bitwarden exports include passkeys.
Have you actually tried exporting a passkey and importing it into another manager, then successfully authenticate with it?
KeepassXC lets you export the private key, which you can then back up or import into another KeepassXC instance. I have tested this, it works. I even shipped my exported private key off to a friend in another state and he was able to import it into a KeepassXC instance and log in to my account. Presumably another password manager could support importing the data, as it's just plaintext, though I don't know if any do.
Unfortunately the spec authors think this export feature violates the spec and have threatened KeepassXC with being banned by authenticating websites[1]. This explicit support from the spec authors for client banning makes passkeys non-viable to me. The websites I log in to should not be able to restrict what clients I choose to use to manage my own data.
[1] Spec author writes, "To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties. ... (RPs [may] block you, something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations)." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
BitWarden is OpenSource. I did try importing the export using my own hosted BitWarden server, it worked.
Just having the data exported is peace of mind for me. It's trivial to import or convert to another format (even if not implemented now), so the worst-case scenario is acceptable, especially considering how much better Bitwarden + Passkeys are to every other form of authentication.
From the article:
> But how can websites know whether its users are using secure authenticators? Authenticators can cryptographically prove certain facts about their origins, like who manufactured it, by generating an attestation statement when the user creates a passkey; this statement is backed by a certificate chain signed by the manufacturer.
How many scummy companies trot out "Let me protect you from yourself" to justify taking away their users' freedoms?
> Does anyone know the state of the standard wrt this?
Exporting/transporting keys seems to be optional on the part of implementors, but my solution has been to use Bitwarden, so I at least get cross platform keys.
I use KeepassXC on my PC. Not sure of an app for mobile though.
https://strongboxsafe.com/
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much to help with vendor lock in directly (like, you may or may not be able to export the private key(s) depending on the tool, and in some cases it’s definitely not possible like with a hardware key), but any website that supports passkeys supports WebAuthn in general so you shouldn’t have difficulty migrating to another tool if desired, although you would need to register again.
Passkeys support an attestation anti-feature, enshrined in the spec. This feature can be abused (and will be IMO, why put it in the spec otherwise?) to limit which providers can access a service. Lock-in is built into the design.
One of the developers already threatened to use it against keepass when they built an export feature he didn't agree with.
Attestation is probably the best feature of passkeys.
From a corporate compliance perspective, I need to ensure that employee keys are stored in a FIPS-compliant TPM and unexportable. Key loss is not an issue because we have, ya know, an IT department. The only way I can ensure this happens is by whitelisting AAGUIDs and enforcing attestation.
With these factors I can also get out of the MFA hellhole (because I can prove that whitelisted vendor X already performs MFA on-device without me having to manage it: for example, WHFB requires something you have (keys in your TPM) and either something you are (face scan / fingerprint) or something you know (PIN), without me having to store/verify any of those factors or otherwise manage them). Same goes for passkeys stored in MS Authenticator on iOS/Android.
This is fine for corporate settings, where the data is not owned by the user but by the company. But it's completely unacceptable for managing one's own personal account. What do I do if I do not trust proprietary software to manage my ability to log in to online services? How can this be compatible with open source passkey providers?
The spec failing to distinguish between these two cases is a major flaw and completely kills passkey viability for personal accounts until they resolve it.
Apple has stated very publicly and in multiple places/ways that Consumer Passkeys will never include attestation data on Apple hardware. That's not "the spec", but it is still currently a big enough moat to protect Consumer usage of passkeys away from Corporate needs, given most Consumer apps/websites probably want iOS/iPadOS/macOS (in decreasing interest) users today.
> Apple has stated very publicly and in multiple places/ways that Consumer Passkeys will never include attestation data on Apple hardware.
I'm interested in reading more about this. Do you have some links? I did some quick searching of the terms you mentioned and nothing obvious came up.
Yeah, it's unfortunate we live in an age where searching for things is harder and less likely to turn up the results from even a couple months ago.
Some quick bits and pieces from my own searching just now:
Apple's documentation on Passkey attestation is entirely under "declarative configuration", their terminology for mobile device management (MDM) corporate tools: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/passkey-attestati...
It is noticeably absent from, for instance, AuthenticationServices documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...
On non-attestation Passkey responses intentionally send an empty AAGUID for privacy/Apple's belief in the spec's suggestion to send an empty AAGUID:
> iCloud Keychain is one of the few (maybe the only?) passkey authenticator that currently follows the spec and will use an all-zero AAGUID.
From: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/739004
On the technical side of limitations of attestation for consumer Passkeys (due to iCloud Keychain sync):
> Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.
> Attestation was designed to attest to a specific device, exclusively at the point of creation, with a specific set of security properties. It doesn't make sense for synced credentials for a number of reasons, including syncing to devices with different security properties, changes in security properties that happen after key creation, security properties of the sync fabric, sharing the passkey, or exporting to other passkey providers. We're working hard with W3C and FIDO to solve these problems.
From: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/708982
(I believe some of the problems being solved in that one in 2022 is referring to how we got the "uvi" and "uvm" extensions to Passkeys, neither of which is in attestation data nor attested in any way, and both designed for a general semblance of user privacy: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-1/#sctn-uvi-extension)
I believe the juiciest quotes I'm looking for are buried in WWDC videos and I can't find a transcript search tool just yet.
Excellent writeup. This is the true kicker:
> Passkeys do not provide an attestation statement, as the attestation model currently defined in WebAuthn wasn't designed with syncing credentials in mind.
On any platform, attestation and "syncing" are effectively opposites. Either you're getting attestation that the auth comes from a secure application and on secure hardware (read: non-exportable in-TPM crypto material), or not.
As usual, it's a tug-of-war between security and convenience.
Attestation is only about security if there are ways for people to handle it themselves. Think of them like certs where anyone can buy one or get one for free using lets-encrypt. I should be able to attest my own keys in a similar way. If I cannot then they are not really about security but about control and lock-in.
But most passkey providers don’t return attestation data. How do you get the data?
Attestation is not provided by the passkey provider itself, but the OS.
For example, iOS uses the App Attest service (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/prepar...). On Android, you get it from Google Play Services (https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview) then the built in key attest service (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...). MS Authenticator does all the legwork and returns the results to you at sign-in time.
On Windows, WHFB has this built in (obviously). On macOS, this comes from Platform SSO (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/dep7bbb0531...).
None of the common passkey implementations support attestation.
Apple doesn't support it at all anymore; Google only supports it for non-synchronized credentials (which are arguably not passkeys). Bitwarden obviously doesn't either (it can't, as a pure software implementation).
> One of the developers already threatened to use it against keepass when they built an export feature he didn't agree with.
Developer of what? There's no competing software solution that supports attestation, and hardware authenticators complement software ones, rather than compete with them.
https://github.com/timcappalli, "passkeys, FIDO2/WebAuthn, and digital credentials @ okta"
Not directly threatening but within that frame of mind:
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...
> Passkeys support an attestation anti-feature, enshrined in the spec. This feature can be abused (and will be IMO, why put it in the spec otherwise?) to limit which providers can access a service.
The problem is that Passkeys really conflate two separate feature sets:
1. Synchronized password replacements. They _have_ to be represented as accessible clear-text to be synced between devices, at least during transit. So they can be stolen, for example, by malware that scans RAM for keys.
2. Keys that never leave a hardened hardware devices. Since they never leave the device, they can't be synced. But they're completely secure.
This is largely a problem because the specification does not cleanly call these out as two completely different feature sets, e.g. via "profiles" or a similar mechanism.
Effectively implementations already do that, and the spec could clear things up a lot by clearly defining one profile for synchronizing, non-attestation-capable, discoverable credentials called "passkeys", and another for hardware-backed, non-exportable, attestation-supporting ones called something else.
Yes, clearly separating these two use-cases would have helped immensely.
This technically is true because Passkeys are just a subset of WebAuth.
> Generally, authenticators are “something you have.”
Shameless plug: Here's one that is "something you know" :) https://github.com/lxgr/brainchain
It derives all keypairs from a passphrase, and rederives the private key from the key handle, similar to "stateless" hardware authenticators.
Please don't use it for anything important – it's a fundamentally bad idea, similar to "brain wallets"; I only implemented it to figure out whether it was possible, and to improve my own understanding of the WebAuthN and FIDO specifications.
There was an interesting Kickstarter a while ago called DiceKeys https://www.crowdsupply.com/dicekeys/dicekeys that provided a physical mechanism to store the seed of a passkey.
If you then purchased passkeys that supported a custom seed, you could then replicate this seed to as many keys as you needed.
There are always security tradeoffs, but this was a mechanism to store something in the real world that had about 115 bits of entropy, as 'Something you know'
So how well do passkeys work when you don't sync passwords. When you bounce from machine to machine. From OS to OS.
How well does password recovery work in those scenarios?
This is a really common question but it has a really simple answer. They still have recovery methods. You can optionally change these with most providers (go into account settings, setup something like a recovery codes and check the option to be completely passwordless) but regardless they still have recovery methods. As in i lost my phone and i recovered the account with a combination of my secondary email and old password.
You might argue "but if they still have the recovery methods isn't my account only as secure as those" and to that i'd point out that you're still way ahead with passkeys simply by not entering passwords on a routine basis. The recovery methods tend to be two factor as well, just without passkeys as one of the two factors (hence email+password) so still a win over password alone in any case.
Passkeys should be thought of as no different to the old two factor authenticators. I mean that's literally what they are, essentially the latest fido standard that allows devices such as your phone to be a hardware security key in its own right. These always had ways to do account recovery with all the providers.
Should allow multiple passkeys. So you have one per device.
That introduces new friction to setting up a new device, which is worse than the case with passwords.
You can use the same passkey for multiple devices (for example with keepassxc as authenticator that handles them), but it reduces security same as for example with using ssh private key that's not unique per device.
It works great with physical keys. Just need one as backup you leave at home.
And you need to register for every new service you create an account with.
It's also not a good idea to store the backup at home – house fires are unfortunately a thing, and chances are you might not have time to grab either your main or your backup key.
Somewhat off-topic: Does anyone know the underlying strength of the keys used as the "root of trust" behind passkey synchronization on Android/iOS? I can't find a lot of documentation on this.
It seems like they're synced between devices using client-side encryption, with keys derived from your phone's lock code (typically only 4-6 digits). Is it possible that the passkeys are fully random, but then encrypted with far less than 128/256 bits of actual entropy while being synchronized between devices?
Could it be possible to brute force the keys server-side (IIUC, derived from 4-6 digit pins) with non-excessive amounts of compute? What am I missing?
A confidential channel can be established over an insecure medium using e.g. Diffie-Hellman key exchange. To protect against MITM, an out-of-band QR/bluetooth can be used.
Typically you see symmetric encryption keys (AES-256 is the most common), derived from a Password KDF. I don't know what Google or Apple do specifically, but that'd be my first guess.
Are passkeys seeing any traction?
I've got no overall stats but they are very well integrated in to iOS. You could end up using them without really even knowing what passkeys are. Websites and apps just prompt you with "add a passkey" and if you hit accept you get one and it gets synced to all your other Apple devices and just works.
I don't use them much because I don't have a good way to register them and use them across device ecosystems. I use all three OSes regularly.
1Password and BitWarden both support Passkey sync across all three OSes. Though if you are using Android regularly enough that may imply you trust Google implicitly enough that you probably could also just get away with Chrome Passkey sync which I'm told also works on all three OSes today.
Or treat it as an opportunity to try to avoid "vendor lock-in"/increase redundancy by using all three to have 3+ passkeys in every service. Windows 11 can act as useful a bridge for bootstrapping all of your keys into a service: register for a site first on iOS or Android, use Windows 11 bluetooth to login via the first passkey, add a Windows passkey, and use Windows 11 bluetooth again to add the third. (Or some combo of that with the Windows iCloud Passwords app and/or Chrome.)
I guess I'm partially just stubborn because I don't want to pay for what should be a cross platform standard.
KeepassXC is a good client that lets you handle your data how you want. I wrote a pro-Passkey blog post here[1] that explains how to do your own syncing, though I later discovered Passkeys are explicitly built to support proprietary software vendor lock in and had to revoke my support. If you are concerned about being able to control your own data outside of the big tech ecosystem, I strongly recommend avoiding passkeys entirely. It is possible for now, but they are not built for that and the spec authors are actively hostile to you managing your own data.
[1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
I also meant to mention that many Keepass clients support Passkeys already today. Strongbox on iOS and macOS has similar or better integration to 1Password/BitWarden. Windows you probably want KeepassXC for now as it isn't fully baked in mainline Keepass. I don't know what you'd use on Android today, but I'm sure there's at least one and probably more on the way.
Bitwarden is free, and if you are concerned about these terms changing, the excellent self-hosted open source server implementation "vaultwarden" [1] supports passkeys as well.
[1] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
Yep
Why does a browser have to be in the loop?
Because the browser knows the internet domain that the login/registration is for. And the browser also provides the JavaScript API to talk to the authenticator (navigator.credentials.create and navigator.credentials.get).
Is there a "platform authenticator" that allows import/export of the actual origin site, keypair, and credential id in plaintext? The next would be a variety of platform authenticators able to import and use those?
I don't want vendor lockin and I don't want proprietary third party cloud based backup/recovery.
Today with totp, I store the plaintext otpauth url and I can use oathtool to spit out codes when needed on my desktop. My phone has aegis, but I don't use any cloud based backup/recovery. I switched from Google Authenticator after they implemented their cloud based syncing to google.
KeepassXC allows this, but the spec authors think this is bad and have threatened KeepassXC with being banned by authenticating websites. The spec has explicit support for banning clients built in. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
Some open source password managers provide this, but the general industry is working on a way to transfer between hosts without having to dump everything out in plain text in between.
Challenge-response with asymmetric encryption is pretty much perfect. I wish all auth worked like SSH.
Passkeys kind of take that concept, but make it suck. No backups. Terrible interoperability.
The other day I attempted to create one on my Mac with Firefox. The system passkey popup came up and made me scan a QR code with my iPhone that had to be connected to the internet. Bitwarden (my iOS passkey manager, that part works well) did open, but after selecting the profile to create the passkey in, it errored out. No passkey for me.
I implemented passkeys @ $WORK, and we rolled it out to our tech department only first. Nobody could make it work reliably, and troubleshooting it was basically impossible. The best you could do was just wipe their passkeys and have them try again.
I've since disabled passkey support and we have no plans to attempt a new rollout anytime soon.
As far as I can tell the only people that have "successfully" rolled out passkeys are the companies with effectively zero user support and they just refuse to support passkeys at all, so if they don't work for a particular user: whatever.
TOTP is fully rolled out and well supported. Troubleshooting it is "hard", but at least it's possible.
TOTP troubleshooting basically boils down to 3 things:
* Server time
* User Phone/device time(most users opt to use their phone to generate TOTP, but we don't care)
* More than one TOTP saved for a given site(i.e. they didn't replace the old and created a new TOTP shared key) or not saved at all.
Our tech/user support helpdesk can handle this but it took a lot of training. We built special tools. We still get requests from them when they get overwhelmed with the complexity.
Passkey troubleshooting:
* Mobile network, including bluetooth
* Server network connectivity
* Computer/device network, including BT connectivity to mobile device.
Most tech support can't handle that much complexity at once. Shoot, most developers and tech "whiz" people can't either. The error messages one does get, if they are lucky, are very general and not helpful at all(last I checked).
Passkeys are not currently fit for production where you have to support the users. I hope they get there.
1Password is the only client/device implementation of Passkeys that pretty much just works. It saves the passkey in the 1p vault, and the 1p vault can be synced across devices.
The problem with TOTP is that it isn’t a second factor. It’s like Kerberos for the web. Passkeys are similar, only allow hardware devices with PIN.
How is it not a second factor ?
It's something else that is unrelated to your password that you have to provide in order to log in, is that not the definition of a factor of authentication ?
Because it's phishable ?
Passwords are "something you know". TOTP is "something you know". It wanted to be "something you have", but it's not. Proof: I can put TOTP tokens into my password manager now. Anything that can go into my password manager is proved to be "something I know" by the fact I can put it into my password manager.
Incidentally, passkeys go into my password manager too. You can probably work the math from there.
(I'm heterodox on this matter, though. I don't believe in the existence of "things you are" and "things you have". I think it's all ultimately just "things you know" and it's all better analyzed in terms of the cost of knowing and proving knowledge, and that the 3-factor framework for authentication is wrong.)
Isn't it the same for passkeys? I can put passkeys in password managers like Bitwarden, 1password, ...
It’s a second password - not a bad thing, but still vulnerable to many categories as attacks.
totp is not a second password, it is immune to data/password leaks because it expires quickly
Not really. You just need a working clock and the string. Conveniently available in your password manager.
Same with passkeys when you think about it. Just need the private key.
For fingerprints/etc you generally just need a great camera.
FWIW, I migrated to ed25519-sk SSH keys backed by FIDO2 credentials on my Yubikeys, and I really love it. The fact that my credentials effectively can never be lifted out of my hardware key is quite comforting.
I haven't had any problems with syncing and using passkeys with 1Password and Firefox on MacOS, iOS, or Windows. When the site wants to create or use a passkey I get a prompt from 1Password on the device that I'm using. No need to involve a second device (which for me I'm fine with security-wise. If I really wanted to be sure there was no way of malware extracting the keys I would be using my Yubikeys)
What kind of Mac and what version of MacOS?
I remember those QR codes and needing to use my phone when I tried passkeys a couple years ago when I was on an older Mac that didn't have hardware support for biometrics.
Every since I got a Mac with that support passkey creation has worked fine entirely on the Mac.
Passwords and password managers seem good enough to me, and TOTP support is everywhere now.
Passkeys just feel like a standard written by large tech companies as a flywheel technology to keep me locked into whatever hardware and software ecosystem I'm already in since seemingly no one besides maybe Bitwarden supports exporting them. Which seems pointless, because I don't know of any platform that supports importing them.
I am also getting tired of corporate white knight nerds defending trillion dollar companies telling me that portability isn't a concern.
Password/TOTP does not protect you against phishing. The phishing site can forward the password and TOTP you type into the real system, gaining your access.
FIDO/WebAuthn/Passkeys protect you against phishing, because of the origin binding mentioned in the article. On the phishing site, the required credential cannot be generated, and so no matter how convincing it is you can't accidentally give them a credential to forward.
Phishing is what these systems were trying to defend against.
Now if you were to say that the move from plain FIDO tied to a hardware key to passkeys tied to a Google account was a lock-in ploy ---- then I might be more inclined to agree.
Considering there's an entire portion of the software industry built on accepting a user's credentials and also prompting them for their TOTP, I don't think this really matters.
It's not an acceptable trade-off. And the answer isn't, "Those third-parties shouldn't be asking for your password and TOTP," because that's not a realistic premise.
> The phishing site can forward the password and TOTP you type into the real system, gaining your access.
To me this seems harder to pull off than a fraudulent password reset (either via social engineering, or a hacked email account). My TOTP fell in the drink a few years back, and some accounts very hard to reset and others were too easy.
If you're targeting a particular person, social engineering is probably easier. If you just want to illicitly harvest some accounts, and aren't too worried about which ones, blasting out emails linking to hacked websites that fake the login & TOTP flow is very easy.
A couple years ago there were several posts here about not using PassKeys, and I went along with that for a bit. But I’ve fallen in love with them. They’re so nice to use with 1Password.
I suppose I might want to stop using 1Password someday, but it still has all my passwords as well so I can just fallback to those. And, honestly, only a fraction of the sites I have in 1Password have PassKeys available.
What I hate much more is sites that don’t have passwords and require you to log in via email every time. It drives me NUTS.
Passkeys are fantastic! I encourage my family and friends to utilize them as an alternative to passwords whenever possible.
Compared to everything else, they are so much of a nicer experience. I despise the "click the link we just emailed you" so much. And MFA is a pain, and still has security issues: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/state-of-the-art-phishing...
I really don't get all the hate for Passkeys on HN...
> I really don't get all the hate for Passkeys on HN...
It feels like the first step in a vendor lock-in strategy. Basically boils down to that. That's essentially my issue anyway.
I get the security behind email-only sign in, but waiting on mail servers is so slow!
Passkeys are honestly the most frictionless system. No more waiting for 2FA codes and having to type them in. No more getting locked out of your accounts if you lose your phone.
Passkeys are an API that requires the use of a password manager. It doesn’t lock you into any hardware any more than your password manager does already.
You can’t copy a passkey to a different password manager, but you can create a new one for the same account, which is usually just as good.