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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

When you use passkeys with either Apple's iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager, the key material is end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement cannot get your passkeys through these two big tech companies.

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This is a great point. And to respond to the other part of the parent comment about storing "all their credentials with one of the large tech companies" — you don’t even need to do that, if you don’t want to.

Apple just extended their Credential Provider API such that passkeys can now be synced using external providers, meaning password manager apps can save and offer passkeys on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. So you can choose to sync your passkeys with whatever your favorite password manager is.

See this page: https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/

And Google announced a similar API a month or two ago.

See the section titled "Passkey support for Android apps" on this page: https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/supported-en...

You guys conveniently ignores the fact that Apple and Google are still the gatekeepers in that scenario.

How so

Yes you need to trust your operating system developer to some extent. If your threat model includes not trusting the company that writes the source code to your OS…don’t use computers I guess?

Suppose one does trust their OS developers. And they want to use some passkey-protected service.

Does that service also have to trust the OS developers? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that services can decide whose passkey implementations to trust.

Seems like that should be up to the user, not the service.

The user picks the passkey, don't they? Android, Apple or Microsoft. Or Yubikey, or another token.

The concern is not about trust but gatekeeping the providers.

For example in the case of email, you generaly dont worry about google reading your email but we should definitely be concerned if gmail allows send & recieve from only few domains or providers it chooses.

But no more than they are the gatekeepers of your password when you use their keyboard software, right?

>Law enforcement cannot get your passkeys through these two big tech companies.

Of course they can, just not from the stored cloud data. But that's just software. One little patch and your cloud sync is without E2E.

When Apple or Google control the endpoints (the password manager apps on your devices), they can get the keys at the ends if they really want to.

What is it encrypted by? Or asked differently, what does the user need to have to decrypt it on all their devices? And how can we know that Apple & Co. don't also have access to that? It's not like Law enforcement hacks into your connection, they just force the company to hand out your data.

So your keychain is symmetrically encrypted with a password and they don’t store that?

Among other things, yes[1].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/escrow-security-for...

For apple, yes. but as i understand it, your passkeys are not synced or stored in google password manager, they are only stored on device and never synced through or stored on google servers.

Until law enforcement asks them to make an exception for you in a sealed court decision.

e2e encryption is one forced update away from being plain text.

I trust big tech companies more than I trust startups or smaller tech companies. I have faith that neither Apple nor Google would do that.

This is a personal belief based on chatting with Apple and Google employees. You don't have to agree.

Regardless of how much you trust them, the fact that they can force a decryption of these keys (and selectively, per-user, no less) means that you are not in custody of your own authentication identity. Add to that, they can be legally compelled to take such a measure (and I'm sure they will in due time).

Compared to using, say, KeepassXC with a unique, secure password per vault. Now you can sync on iCloud or google drive, but neither Google nor Apple can decrypt the vault; the keepassXC maintainers presumably could make a malicious update (which you'd still have to accept, since the updates aren't forced on you), but that would also affect the security of everyone using KeepassXC (and potentially be much more harmful to the economy and society as a whole than the government is willing to accept in order to get intel on an individual person of interest)

KeepassXC has a ways to go still before I can trust it. I just attempted to use it again, after a few years, and syncing the DB across google drive randomly caused all of my entries to be erased. No recovery, nothing. just opened the DB one day and all of my saved notes and passwords went poof.

It's a know bug, but the fact that it still exists really shows how much the devs care about making it a really rock solid alternative. I've never had this issue with Google passwords, 1password or any other provider.

Oh for sure, KeepassXC has some UI issues. And in this case, a glaring bug, thank you for making me aware of it! It looks like there are workarounds, though I'm not sure how much I like them.

I've already been doing manual backups. In addition, there is a feature to make a copy of the database before writing that I've just turned on. And the "Use alternative saving method -> Directly write to database file (dangerous)" option is supposed to prevent this issue from happening with cloud storage.

I wasn't in any way arguing KeepassXC is a layperson-friendly way to manage authentication credentials, just that it gives you the most security from the big identity providers (Apple, Google) selling you out for political or selfish reasons.

Of course, there's probably only so much I can do here. Apple could presumable ship an update to their OS that allows them to access a user's database while it's unlocked, or to keylog the master password.

A yubikey might be the only thing that can really protect you here.

When Apple or Google receives a request to give user data, and they get thousands of such requests, they compare the cost of complying and the cost of not complying. I'll tell you an open secret that such companies are doormat-level compliant and are very very proud of that.

please stop spreading unfounded and vicious rumours - or show us some proof.

Am I talking to the hive mind of HN? If not, let others think for themselves.

Remember Snoden. IIRC only two or three guys in all of Skype knew about/worked on the backdoor. Everyone else would have sworn it is end to end encrypted all the time.

> This is a personal belief based on chatting with Apple and Google employees.

Have you chatted with the Apple and Google CEOs? How about with the future Apple and Google CEOs?

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