Neither can passwords if you’re using a password manager to handle them.
So again, if you’ve already got a password manager, and would put your passkeys in a password manager, what is the benefit of passkeys?
Edit: The other great part is that the server just stores your public key, so it's idiot proof on their end. It makes a breach effectively useless, since offline cracking is impossible.
The value of these seem very low. Passkeys are a solution looking for a problem.
Mayve 10 years ago before password managers became a thing they made more sense? Now they're just kind of annoying and hard to share (sharing passwords is a real need for many people /applications / services)
With passkeys it's literally impossible.
I'd see having the user add the domain themselves, or get the user to copy/past the password themselves on some other form. But the phishing is not happening on the password manager side, and these use cases still exist even after you chose passkeys (i.e. I'd still need to somewhat log into Google's auth from my Nest hub for instance to have it show the calendar)
In any case users are trained by the internet to need to search for the right password outside the pinned domains. Most of the time I guarantee people don't add the extra domains to the password records. So when a phishing site pops up they'll do the same: search for the site name/domain that they think they're logging into and go from there.
Password managers solve password reuse, weak passwords, etc. but IMO do not solve phishing, especially not for the kind of user who's most susceptible t it (little technical understand, hates this stuff, just wants to follow instructions and not deal with it), but passkeys might.
These issues won't be solved unless passkeys work absolutely everywhere the user has to authenticate. Logon required or weird and funky domains is currently due to service providers being a mess themselves (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). So should we expect them to miraculously get their act together and have each of these system flawlessly work with their passkey auth. from now on ?
That's where I think we're stuck with that class of issue for as long as there are multiple auth systems, passkeys or not.
I'd still recommend using a password manager, as overall and in practice the risk of phishing and (re)using (weak) passwords is far greater than this kind of rare vulnerabilities (and also I work for a company that makes a password manager ^^)
See https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html if you'd like to know more
I dunno about you. But I like being able to get my passwords out of the password manager. How is not being able to do so a feature?
A password manager, OTOH, is happy to hand out your private key ("password" in this case) to anyone that has access to it.
I want to move my passkeys where I want and use tools I want.
Not allowing anyway of changing passkeys is terrible. Imagine someone switches from IOS to android. How do they use their passkeys?
Even if they had a big “warning don’t do this” sign it would be better than not allowing it in anyway.
Who says you can't change your passkeys? Just log into the site with your existing passkey (or other 2FA) and change it.
This is absolutely not true, it depends heavily on usage patterns of the password manager and its features. Not all are browser extensions that autofill, and even if they did, sites change their domains for auth occasionally that break this functionality (or more often, signup is on a different domain from auth) meaning you must manually copy-paste your password somewhat often if you don't meticulously, and manually, maintain your domain list for a credential. The average person is *not* going to do that, they're going to go "huh, it broke again" and copy paste their randomly generated password.
Please, do not give security advice you are not equipped to handle.
Sure the do. All somebody needs is the password to your password manager. It's a single point of failure and by putting your passkeys in there to you've made it even more vulnerable.
Do you put a passkey on your password manager that exists outside of that ecosystem? Once you have that why not just use it for everything?
The parent wasn't giving security advice. They were asking a valid question.
Not more vulnerable than if they were just using password. You're still missing my point, password managers do not give you the ability to just copy-paste the private key of a passkey into a form field, unlike passwords. Some don't give you access to it at all (*cough* Apple *cough*). Sure you can get the private key if you have access to the password managers vault, but that's not what's being talked about. Common usage patterns matter immensely in security. At the end of the day, the attack surface for passkey-based authentication is smaller than password-based authentication, which is a step in the right direction.
> The parent wasn't giving security advice. They were asking a valid question.
The parent made a blatantly false and dangerous statement and then followed it up with a question. Did we read the same comment?
I also agree that passkey-based authentication provides a smaller attack surface than purely password-based authentication.
But putting the passkey on a second device provides an even smaller attack surface since now a bad actor needs both your device (or a MITM attack) and your password.
This is an HN forum. Nobody's giving "security advice," but I do feel like the parent comment's question hasn't been answered. Why would one store passkeys in their password manager instead of on a separate device?
I feel like we might have a mismatch in understanding what a passkey is. You make a new keypair for each account to authenticate to. A leaked passkey is generally no more vulnerable than a password when leaked.
> But putting the passkey on a second device provides an even smaller attack surface since now a bad actor needs both your device (or a MITM attack) and your password.
Correct. The gold standard is a hardware secured, non-cloud synced private key.
> This is an HN forum. Nobody's giving "security advice,"
It's a technical forum with statements on a technical topic. Making statements like that can always be misinterpreted as technical advice by default.
> but I do feel like the parent comment's question hasn't been answered. Why would one store passkeys in their password manager instead of on a separate device?
This is fair. The answer is: convenience. It is most definitely worse security posture to sync passkeys than to store them on a separate, physical device that can answer challenges without leaking the private key.
The reason to use them over passwords is they are more secure, even when synced to a cloud vault.