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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

The design of passkeys is pretty solidly based around the idea that users are the weakest link the system and need to be protected from themselves. Given how criminally insecure passwords and push/code based MFA are in the face of user incompetence I have a hard time believing that WebAuthn is some grand plot by Big Tech to lock people into their walled gardens.

I think people on HN overestimate the security literacy of the average computer user in a personal/corporate setting. If a sophisticated attacker wanted to target an organiztion with passwords/push auth, it'd be trivial to get some subset of members to copy-paste passwords from managers and accept prompts. I think far more likely than lock-in is that FIDO members genuinely want to make their customers more secure, something that passkeys very much do accomplish for the average user.

That being said, I'm not rushing to enable passkeys on every site. If you already use a good password that enforces origin binding (the key strength of WebAuthn) and you extend that security perimeter through good OpSec (i.e., being careful when copy-pasting passwords), you're not getting much benefit.

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Big tech initiatives can, and often do, have more than one motivation. I'm sure many folks working on AMP only cared about serving web pages faster to users, just like I'm sure many other folks involved loved the lockin potential.

I expect the same is happening with passkeys. Many are just trying to make their customers more secure, but I don't for a second think that companies who are constantly looking for more ways to lock in users don't see any potential for that here.

They're working on a secure exchange format between managers: https://fidoalliance.org/specifications-credential-exchange-...

It has been on the HN frontpage before.

By "secure" understand "from the user escaping big corpos", and one that the most used open source project was already rejected from because open source is just not compatible with it.

Open source isn’t compatible if it isn’t running in a secure attestation environment, because 1) people will modify it to be more convenient and less secure; and then 2) they’ll transfer keys from their HSM into plaintext. I’ve watched extremely competent developers spend months figuring out how to bypass second-device factors in order to have a more convenient workflow with their auth key stored in cleartext in a dot file. I know without a shadow of a doubt that if unattested open source was allowed to interop with passkeys, they’d abuse that just as readily in order to be free of the restrictions that HSM-mandatory storage carries.

Whatever the “most used open source project” you’re referring to is, all they need to do* is issue a 100%-reproducible binary that they then sign with their usual signing key. Once they submit that build for an independent audit and have it verified as not secretly backdoored, then the other password managers can trust it when secure boot attestation chains all the way down to their signature. This maintains the key benefits of open source — inspectability, pull requests, and so on — while adhering the specifications of PassKeys that protect them against expert users.

The password manager, whoever they are, would have likely figured this opportunity out on their own and then rejected it. I can’t be sure, though. Perhaps they didn’t realize it was possible! Or perhaps they opted out of participating.

Whatever the case, that’s not any fault of open source. It’s the fault of signatures: no binary is going to be permitted to exchange PassKeys unless it's signed by a trusted party adhering to the PassKeys ‘HSM only’ agreements. Whether their signed binary is reproducible open source or pure binary closed source is irrelevant in an attested environment.

No user-modifiable solution will ever be acceptable? Unless reproducible builds and audited modifications. But that’s not an open source problem. I have extensive Ghidra experience and source code is certainly no significant obstacle to extracting passwords. Source code is irrelevant to the problem; signatures, attestation, and secure boot are the key.

It would be perfectly reasonable for a consortium of no-cost, no-profit, open source password managers to jointly accept each other’s PassKeys for transfer under attested conditions — and if they did so genuinely without it being backdoored, then that would be a convincing argument both as an alternative to the ‘corporate’ passkeys system, as well as a convincing argument for W3C and the corporations to accept interop with their signed binaries under attested conditions rather than see the PassKeys ecosystem splinter. Certainly the W3C would pressure for their acceptance if their intentions were genuine :)

A useful analogy is blackhat badges. Whether the badge is open source or not has no impact on that blackhat requires an attestation from someone other than you that you’re welcome at the conference. Having source code is like having a badge schematic in this analogy: there are lots of good outcomes from it, but gatecrashing without agreeing to their rules isn’t welcome.

* Assuming that they want to pass at all, as opposed to taking some sort of hard stance against the core precept of PassKeys: i.e. “the user can’t be trusted, even if they’re an expert”. But, again, that’s nothing to do with open source.

But this is exactly the problem: Passkeys as a core principle require that there is a third party that manages access between the user and a service. That's the entire idea.

In the absolute best-case scenario, the user gets to choose which third party to trust and could even switch to a different one later - but the general dependence on a third party will always stay.

It's DRM for passwords.

Yes, precisely! That’s what I’m hoping to raise awareness of here. It’s DRM for passwords, that effectively blocks malicious attackers from exporting credentials, basically without exception.

Is killing off password theft worth the tradeoff of restricting the legitimate user’s rights, or is this a step too far towards authoritarian overreach, no matter how significant the harm done to humanity by password theft?

Societal-level ethics are incredibly interesting to me, so I’m glad that the broader tech community is catching on to the ethical dilemma and engaging with it. PassKeys are a ‘good first bug’ for evaluating large-scale ethical tradeoffs of technology: the benefit and tradeoff are clear and obvious to everyone once explained, unlike so many other ethical dilemmas in tech.

I think passkeys are packaging up two different "innovations" into one system:

1: Replace passwords with classic public key auth. The benefits of that are uncontroversial and the tech has been successfully in use for decades (e.g. with SSH keys).

2: Lock away the private key in a HSM and introduce some complicated set of rules and protocols to ensure that no one, not even the user, ever gets to see it.

Seems to me, most of the security benefit comes from the first part (no confidential data is sent, no password guessing, etc) while most of the problems come with the second part.

So why not unbundle the two parts and add public-key crypto to the web that allows the user to store their private key themselves?

Again, this is how it's done for SSH for decades, and so far I haven't heard of any large-scale SSH phishing campaigns, even though there would be enough attractive targets.

The one benefit that's advertised everywhere is "bullet proof phishing protection", because each key is tied to a domain and the HSM can refuse to sign anything with the key that's not from this domain.

But you could implement an 80% version of that with accessible private keys as well: Just add the domain (or a hash of the domain's TLS cert) to the key's metadata and have the browser refuse to use the key if it doesn't match. A user could spend some effort and change the metadata, but the bar is MUCH higher than just typing in your password somewhere.

A phisher could also try and make the user run some tool that automatically switches the metadata (or just sends off the key directly). But at that point, the phisher would be forced to trip some classic red flags like getting the user to download a tool. Also, if the user did install the tool, they'd have a huge problem even with HSM keys: The tool couldn't access the keys directly, but it could impersonate the user and use the keys.

So I don't see why we have to go from plain passwords to "opaque walled garden" with no step in between.

> ensure that no one, not even the user, ever gets to see it

One small correction: this should read, “especially not the user”, reflecting the research and evidence collected over decades showing that authorized users are an apex threat to their own security.

The problem solved by passkeys is not addressed by #1, or else it would just be S/MIME-like certificates in password managers as we had for twenty years already in browsers only with better UI. If the user has the ability to access to private key underlying the public certificate, then an attacker can convince the user to extract and upload the private key and password, and an expert user can remove the password altogether. Passkeys takes the view that social engineering and malware attacks cannot be prevented so long as the secret is retrievable from the HSM into an unmanaged file, clipboard, etc.

The only way to close the social engineering attack vector is to design a system where users cannot upload a key even if they’re conned, which is why passkeys implement both #1 (to stop transmitting the secret) and #2 (to deny all human beings the footgun). And the only way that we know of in tech today, to technically deny humans their footgun when they have physical access to the device, is to build the OS around an HSM with secure boot and attestation so that the user can’t naively or expertly bypass the footgun safety by installing software.

So, today, we have to choose as an industry between denying users the right to extract private keys from the HSM, and allowing attackers to exploit users to extract private keys from the HSM. There is no known middle ground. Should we prioritize liberty over safety, or safety over liberty? That is the core contention of Passkeys, and ultimately of attestation.

> Passkeys takes the view that social engineering and malware attacks cannot be prevented so long as the secret is retrievable from the HSM into an unmanaged file, clipboard, etc.

Yeah, I know that Passkeys takes that view. I'm questioning that view.

We have precedent in form of SSH, PGP, S/MIME, TLS client certificates (or actually even just regular TLS certificates) and all kinds of crypto wallets. Have there been any actual studies how many private keys in those systems were sucessfully exfiltrated through phishing?

Because this justification sounds an awful lot like an excuse for lock-in and control creep - like the mandatory auto-updates that were also promoted in the name of security and now are frequently used to push through anti-features that go against the interests of the users.

Crypto wallet malware is widespread, SSH and AWS key theft is a regular and successful target of Python module malware, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791058 is the most recent post (yesterday) I can find, suggesting 200,000 impacted in a single malware instance. On average there are hundreds to thousands a year, but I don’t know their theft volume.

How many need to be impacted before the interests of user security should be given precedence over the interests of user liberties? Is there a hard line amount or is it fuzzy? Is it in the thousands, millions, or billions?

You’re definitely asking an excellent line of questioning, in my view. IS all of this Passkeys crap worth it? Will it make a significant and meaningful difference? That has to be a set of questions that the W3C has presumably studied, and if you’re lacking for sources to begin research, I would check their drafts and discussions first.

I’m not the right person to look for studies pro/con to your viewpoint, though: this topic, as with most social morality topics, is essentially academic to me — which is one of the great joys of being asocial, as I love that academia, but also means that I can’t construct a working theory of mind to support someone else’s viewpoint, pro or con, without it being uncanny valley broken and weird. I see a lot of people upset about this topic and it’s transparent enough for me to lay it out plainly, and I care about people en masse and I want to see these discussions progress beyond “this sucks” reflexive disregard and towards - for examples - “is there any better way technically”, “what led to the sacrifice of liberty deemed acceptable”, and “is it appropriate to be so cynical about human beings when they’re their own biggest enemy”.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The amount of cryptocurrency stolen due to exposed keys on the filesystem is likely staggering

This is one of the aspects of passkeys that make them unacceptable for me to use. They're just a nonstarter. If they're forced on us, it's just yet another thing that is making the web smaller and smaller for me.

> Is killing off password theft worth the tradeoff of restricting the legitimate user’s rights, or is this a step too far towards authoritarian overreach, no matter how significant the harm done to humanity by password theft?

If your government can order your password manager to lock you out of your passwords with no more trouble than locking you out of your bank account, then that lowers the cost of tyranny down to what the Chinese Communist Party enjoys.

https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-...

I'm sorry, this is an absolute monstrous attitude towards user freedom in the name of security. There is no way I'm using passkeys if this is what they're about.

No need to apologize to me. Raising awareness is my mission goal for discussing attestation at HN. Not to promote it — there’s one specific use case for it that I think is firmly appropriate and PassKeys isn’t that! — but to ensure that people are informed about what’s going on so that it can be evaluated face-on.

Believe this is the goal of pushing towards secure compute like Google’s SafetyNet or Windows 11 with tpm.

Feels like there are some more thematic underpinnings as well like security at the cost of user freedom or at the cost of tinker-ability.

The Windows 11 TPM push parallels macOS and the T2 chip, except years later. Once Win11 is in the majority, I imagine web attestation will start to go live in web banking, because they hate paying for fraud investigations.

But. The silent looming threat I predict that few others seem to see, is that Valve will guaranteed enable TPM w/ secure boot attestation in a future Steam Deck hardware update after everyone bails from Windows 10 to Valve Linux, giving it true standing as a console and overcoming today’s multiplayer lockouts by AAA games (unattested Linux is a godsend for software cheaters compared to Windows), while having captured that market on the pretense of tinkerability with full intentions to betray that unstated assumption in favor of regaining AAA multiplayer support in games.

Similarly, that’s why so many AMD gaming processors already ship with Microsoft’s secure attestation Proton chip from the Xbox inside: if Microsoft wants to end kernel-rootkit anticheat, they have to offer another solution, or else competitive PC multiplayer online gaming dies when Microsoft slams the door on Crowdstrike. Secure attestation, coming to a Steam instance near you. (And not to single out Valve — Epic will go there too!)

Console-grade attestation is coming to computers everywhere, because just as with password theft, it uniformly prevents virtually all software-based cheating. It won’t stop hardware-based cheating, but doi:10.1109/SERE-C.2012.43 and Apple mFI already demonstrated that peripheral attestation can arrive at any time — there just isn’t any point in doing so for Win/Lin gaming when most users aren’t using attestation. Yet.

Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little trying to convey the threat to repurposeability here, but, like, this is what’s coming, because after the Crowdstrike worldwide outage, kernel rootkits are on the way out - and the side effects are going to be devastating. This is why I don’t just say, as one comment below does, “fuck you” to attestation: that approach has no effect and it’s coming for everyone unless more people than I start confronting it and understanding it.

The walls really are closing in though. There's basically no way we can avoid this scenario.

So we don't use passkeys? OK, fine, in 2025 that's possible. But for how long? How many sites and services are going to start requiring this? Will they care if a few HN readers are blocked out?

The only way to prevent this nightmare is to convince tech illiterate people to also avoid passkeys, but good luck! This kind of convenience is too attractive and the downsides are too hard to communicate to them.

It’s still possible to avoid this scenario. For example, imagine how conservative tech-hostile politicians would react if they understood how passkeys gives big tech authority over their money. Or when police discover that they no longer have the ability to extract passwords with a wrench. Or how parents won’t be able to access some accounts because the kid stored a passkey outside of iCloud and now it’s parent-proof. Massive outrage is due to tech over this, considering historical trends, but either no one realizes the benefits of them — or everyone doesn’t care because it’s worth not having their password stolen.

The standards body did a really excellent job solving the problem. Is outrage deserved? Is this better or worse than our freedom? I would watch that debate if someone posted a video of a panel discussing the contradictions! Because I’m not sure where I stand, either.

But I just cannot stand the obliviousness that everyone has over attestation. It’s not a done deal yet. I just haven’t seen tech suggest anything to do about it, and that continues to worry.

The key is to lie. Most tech illiterate people get their approximate knowledge from more tech literate people, who get their knowledge from the technical folk. Tech illiterate people don't know how passkeys work, if we start saying that it's just a way for scammy companies to steal your passwords, that'll eventually become truth.

To any third party that claims to need to come between me and any of my auth keys, I have only one thing to say: "Fuck off".

This looks entirely optional and at the discretion of the provider, and not part of the spec itself. Please correct it that's wrong.

Passkeys seem like a kludge.

A single per-user client certificate is a cleaner solution, without the vendor lock in problem, since there’s no need for real time synchronisation of an evolving set of passkeys.

I also think client certificates is a better solution. However, it does not have to be single per-user.

For example, a service that you register an account on can issue a certificate to you; you could use it directly or you could use that certificate to issue another certificate to yourself, with a different key, and storing the private key of the original certificate on a separate computer that is not connected to the internet, making it less likely to compromise (if the certificate actually used is compromised, it could be revoked and you can issue a new one to yourself).

If the service defines an extension for the authorization granted by the certificate, then you could issue a certificate to yourself that has an extension to restrict the authorization, therefore allowing partial delegation of authorization. (Some operation would be authorized only if all of the certificates in the chain authorize that operation.)

The partial delegation of authorization can also be used to issue certificates to others, perhaps for a limited time (by setting the expiry date). For example, if one service can access another service to do some operation on your behalf, you can issue a certificate to the first service (this is one case where a client issues a certificate to a server), with the limited authorization that is required, and then that first service will use that certificate to authenticate with the second service, to do the operation.

A service that wants someone to be able to use their account from another service to log in to their own one can also do so (although usually this should not be required, since someone might not want the other service).

The private keys can optionally be passworded for additional security, and the server doesn't know nor care about this. (Passworded private keys is probably not useful for server certificates, but it is useful for client certificates.)

The use of mutual TLS authentication has other security benefit as well.

Having a single certificate makes it trivial to implement cross-website tracking. FIDO2 (and by extension Passkeys) prevent this by having a unique key for every (origin, username) combination.

Also, having a single cert shared across multiple hardware tokens is a security risk, as it becomes impossible to distinguish the tokens or revoke only a single one of them.

The vast majority of users treat their set of passkeys as a unit anyway, so there’s no scenario when a single token would need to be revoked in isolation. A breach of one passkey can only occur from breaching the password manager itself, in which case all passkeys are exposed, so there’s no security benefit to having per site passkeys.

Users who truly need that ability can create multiple certificates, and synchronise them as appropriate.

perhaps this a good moment for you to engage in some reflection and consider that perhaps some people have put more thought in to "how do we replace passwords" than you did in making a single hacker news comment?

you:

> A single per-user client certificate is a cleaner solution, without the vendor lock in problem, since there’s no need for real time synchronisation of an evolving set of passkeys.

reply:

> Having a single certificate makes it trivial to implement cross-website tracking.

you:

> Users who truly need that ability can create multiple certificates, and synchronise them as appropriate.

well, indeed! perhaps designing a system to support multiple certificates with synchronisation, so that we're not forcing ever user to be trackable by every single website, would be a good idea.

some sort of keys to enable one's passage in to a website?

this is a cancer on this website, and certainly one I'm also suffering from, despite being quite aware of it - real life things are usually pretty complicated and just because I know enough to make a random guess at a solution, it doesn't mean people who have put way thought in to the problem have done a bad job or missed by brilliant insight.

Get rid of the CA-style provider certification and let me implement the API directly, myself, with just Python or a C compiler.

Until you do that it's corpo malware and I will live in a tent in the woods before I use it.

This is exactly what exists today. There is no "CA-style provider certification" in the synced passkey ecosystem. It is completely open.

Remember when the internet of military contractors got exfiltrated because the CI/CD pipeline of a firewall vendor got breached?

Guess what their password was: solarwinds123

So yes, I am in favor of passkeys everywhere because humans are bad at realizing their operational risks when they start creating an account and haven't even used it yet.

Without password managers, humans tend to reuse their passwords, which makes one breach a breach of all accounts. Humans are also bad at remembering passwords, so time based recreation of passwords will always lead to the month or week or iteration as a suffix.

And that's the actual problem that can be prevented with passkeys (or MFA that is not based on sending SMS or emails which are unencrypted as a transport channel).

But I agree with the author's implied sentiment: export/import should work between password managers and be required by law, because currently Microsoft's authenticator workflow is pretty useless if you can reset the passkeys via email ownership anyways.

> Remember when the internet of military contractors got exfiltrated because the CI/CD pipeline of a firewall vendor got breached? Guess what their password was: solarwinds123

So I get to be punished because of incompetent military contractors?

You seem to not even read my argument.

Opsec is about reducing risk from one potential breach to not affect other parts of your life.

Assuming you never made a mistake in your online life is a foolish assumption.

I read it. My point isn't that this is bad. My point is that it's a solution that imposes a large enough burden on at least some people that it's not automatically an unambiguous win. For me, it represents a large enough burden that if it were forced on me, I'd just stop using the web sites doing so.

Which, you have to admit, is the most secure option. All security measures represent a tradeoff, and sometimes that tradeoff is not worth it.

> My point is that it's a solution that imposes a large enough burden on at least some people that it's not automatically an unambiguous win.

That to me is the problem with Passkeys. They are not an unambiguous win.

> when they start creating an account and haven't even used it yet.

This is a niche case that is already handled more or less properly by the BigTech.

Why is this a niche use case?

Are you suggesting that people will change their passwords after they created an account and realize that it needs a better level of security?

Because I would argue that Collection #1-#6 proved the exact opposite: Humans reuse passwords, and invent sequences or suffixes when forced to change it.

It's probably not a grand plot at this moment. But yeah, it seems like I'm going to eventually be forced to involve a third party in my login processes, and it will come with not much benefit to me, and will come with a bunch of risks and downsides.

It might actually be net positive across the Internet, especially for the most vulnerable people. But at the same time, it could also easily become yet another source of sweet behavioral data ripe for abuse by big tech and government

Have you tried to log in AWS account using corporate identity? How many redirects it takes?

Or Bing/Microsoft?

Or the new trendy thing where you have to put in your email before password field is shown (because it may require 2-auth).

All of these platforms made authentication less secure because a) due to so many differen domains handling authentication I no longer can know if I am at the one I should trust b) since there's often no password shown password mamagers no longer automatically fill in username fields

These idiots broke the system that worked so well before with a password manager and it no longer works. For very little reason.

Don't say it's users who are to blame, it is as much the big companies who are making it worse because they are dysfunctional.

> I have a hard time believing that WebAuthn is some grand plot by Big Tech to lock people into their walled gardens.

I do not agree. I think it (and some related things) is a grand plot, and mostly seems to benefit Google and Cloudflare, for lock in. (They might also want to actually improve security in some ways, but that is minor, and there are better ways to do that anyways.)

I think X.509 would be better (and does not require a web browser to use, nor does it hide stuff from the user, and also does not require a new different incompatible specification to be made for everything). (Unfortunately, the way X.509 is often used (for server authentication) is also in bad ways, but it can be used better, both for server side and client side.)

>I think people on HN overestimate the security literacy of the average computer user in a personal/corporate setting.

Sure. Provide an escape hatch for the technically literate and let us use our ssh-agent then.

Here's your escape hatch: https://bitwarden.com/help/export-your-data/

Bitwarden even now supports passkeys on mobile browsers and apps. As a happy user for over 5 years it's been great being able to configure something less theatrical than push/codes without needing to plug in my YubiKey every time.

Sadly, right now, bitwarden is the only provider that will dump your passkeys into a JSON. No one else offers it, and there is no functionality from any provider to import and adopt the JSON that bitwarden exports.

Passwords have their faults, but they do have a zero-technology backup option that your heirs can execute. (A printed dump of the password vault in a locked fire safe.)

I'm surprised that especially financial service providers don't have a very clear "in the event of death/emergency" flow. I know you can sometimes label an account payable-on-death/joint-ownership/trust/other weird tax-dodge shaped things, but that doesn't solve the technical problem of "how do I log in and initiate my claim when Grandpa kicks the bucket."

I prepared the fire-safe paper, but I can imagine my family getting stuck at the institutions who demand 2FA and probably won't have access to my phone or email at the time.

The whole point is that you aren't supposed to be able to login and continue business as usual. You need to call or write to the financial institution and provide proper legal documentation (death certificate) before you can assume control of the account.

This is a GOOD thing.

That's fine for financial accounts, but people have hundreds of accounts, and you don't know which ones are the ones that matter beforehand. Is it your family member's AO3 stories that you want? Or maybe the login to the web forum that was their primary social outlet in old age? This assumes that those non-financial sites even have a process to let you in.

KeepassXC also has the option to export passkeys

Happy user of Bitwarden and use their passkey support when I can. But generally I've been underwhelmed with the passkey UX, likely no fault of Bitwarden or similar. With extensions installed, Android configured to use Bitwarden for passkeys, etc, it feels like a 10% chance or so Bitwarden will be checked for a passkey and otherwise it's randomly either the browser or phone. Without being able to reliably read a passkey, I always need to set up password + OTP as a backup. While there's some benefit to passkeys when available, having to set up multiple auths anyways just makes it feel like too much of a hassle...

And how long until the attestation feature is used to ban their implementation? The threats have already been made to keepass.

The main benefit you get is that you don't have to type in 2FA codes anymore since 2FA was built to solve credential stuffing / password reuse which isn't a problem on Passkeys.

It is nice to just have a one click login for things.

First-generation 2FA solved basic credential compromise issues using code-based methods (e.g. TOTP/HOTP). Modern 2FA (e.g. push notifications) adds authentication integrity, phishing resistance, and user validation through real-time, context-aware approvals.

Passkeys replace passwords and also render basic TOTP/HOTP-based 2FA unnecessary. However, they do not replace modern, push-based 2FA, which may still be needed in higher-assurance or enterprise scenarios.

Regardless personally I am waiting for full FIDO Alliance interoperability/sync, so I'm not locked into a single password manager. I've already had to migrate password managers after my choice was taken over by Private Equity.

Push notifications are vulnerable to MFA fatigue/"bombing" attacks, that are used in the real world, cf. this breach on Uber:

https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/uber-...

The main benefit of FIDO2 is origin verification: it is literally impossible to authenticate on a phishing website, as on a phishing website the browser won't send valid origin data to your token.

Push notification based 2FA can never obtain that level of security.

What happens if the origin changes? Suppose I have a passkey for Twitter.com, and now the site is named X.com? Is there some way to migrate the passkey?

Pushed based is also insecure, why would you want that if you have a passkey unlocked by a pin+touch? That's context aware, requires something you have and something you know.

Push notifications don't protect against realtime phishing attacks

> I've already had to migrate password managers after my choice was taken over by Private Equity.

do you remember which one? hope it wasn't bitwarden :/

I have one-click login with 2FA codes stored in 1Password.

And 1Password will still let me export my crazy-long password and TOTP code to a plain text file if I want to switch to a different password manager (of course, I’ll have to do some planning beforehand to make sure that the export destination doesn’t get picked up by my backup software).

Yes but also depends on how the end system is configured.

You can require Google IDP to still have 2FA with passkeys.

Google banned ad blockers from Chrome by claiming it secured non-technical users.

No they didn't. Ublock Origin Lite works fine in Chrome. Certainly they took strong adblocking capabilities away, but I can still browse the web on Chrome fairly ad free.

So… they took away Ublock Origin (and other “strong adblocking”) for the reason I said…?

You said they banned adblockers. This is provably wrong, as there are still many working adblockers in the Chrome Store. They certainly reigned in what Adblockers are capable of doing and made it much easier for websites to bypass them etc in the future, but ban them they did not.

No they didn't. Adguard works fine. Ublock has been dragging its feet, but that's on Ublock. Yes, I know, there were all those clickbait headlines. I saw them too, and people got super upset when you pointed out the clickbait and that adblockers would in fact still work. Well here we are, and lo, adblockers still work.

There's plenty enough of shitty things Google actually does and did, no point in inventing easily disprovable ones.

Mind you, the fact Google could change APIs further to actually prevent adblocking is on its own a sufficient reason to foster competing browsers, so let's perhaps focus on that.

The “strong capabilities” means tracking/fingerprinting prevention. So yeah you might not see ads but the ads see you.

The fact they can do this without pushback is pretty clear sign this will only continue.

I'm fine with ad people knowing that. I think people can overact a bit. I mean do you feel the need to wear a mask and disguise when going to shops and cafes in case the shops and cafes see where you go?

I'm not fine with that data collection at all. It's not even just about ad people, it's about the larger accumulation and sharing of data.

it is a big tech plot to tie people verification to a device they control. there's no way you can sugar coat it.

Get a Yubikey.

It's called Fido Hardware tokens

Can I store a passkey on a YubiKey?

Yes. That's one of the primary use cases of a YubiKey (or other FIDO 2 hardware keys).

Please note that there are 2 types of passkeys:

- resident keys: Actually stored on the hardware key

- non-resident keys: Keys that are recalculated on the fly based on a secret seed value, the domain that the service is for and the username. The advantage is that these don't take up any storage space

Resident keys have the advantage that they remember the username. But there is only a limited number of keys (about 100 on new YubiKeys but there are still a lot of older hardware tokens being used) that you can store on a hardware token. Non-resident keys have the advantage that you can "store" an infinite number of them on your hardware token.

See https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shatt...

> Please note that there are 2 types of passkeys

This is not really correct. Non-resident keys are not passkeys.

The two types of passkeys are synced and device-bound. Synced passkeys are typically stored in software-based credential managers, while device-bound passkeys are typically stored in hardware security keys or hardware-based credential managers.

That's all it does.

This "passkey" business has been so confusing.

I have had an HSM for years. I thought "Passkey" was that stupid Windows thing where they want you to use a 4-digit or 5-digit PIN.

If a "passkey" means an HSM, I'm already onboard. If it means PINs and TPMs, I'm not onboard

HSM can store a passkey that you optionally can use a touch + pin/password to unlock.

Passkey is a catchy but vague name for ssh keys used for website auth.

Everything else about them, such as HSM, is industry overlay motivated by their own motivations and aspirations.

A TPM is an HSM.

Nope, TPM secures your computer from you. HSM offloads sensitive tasks to a trusted device while letting you fiddle with the computer any way you want.

An HSM stores private keys securely. A TPM does this to implement secure boot and disk encryption. And for some reason a lot of people are afraid of disk encryption.

> And for some reason a lot of people are afraid of disk encryption.

I can answer that.

Disk encryption is a risk factor. If my desktop fails and it is unencrypted, I can take the disk and put it into another desktop and it will work.

With encryption, I am less sure. I do encrypt my desktop with LUKS but I vaguely remember that setting up an encrypted disk in Linux is tricky, there is a loop device involved for the decryption layer, some LVM config. And the kernel has to support all that, which it probably does, but again. It's been a long time since I tried.

So while my desktop and my laptops have encrypted partitions, the server running my archives and backup is not, because I value simplicity and access more than the extra security.

People using Windows or Apple hardware should be even more afraid of disk encryption, as they understand it way less than me.

Not one that works across devices/browsers.

A Yubikey is a "device".

Not one that can store an arbitrary number of passkeys that work across different browsers/computers.

I don't think you understand how FIDO2 works.

If you are using non-discoverable keys, the type where you input your username to login and then it asks for the passkey, there is no limit because they are calculated from a single master key and seeded with the url.

If you are using discoverable keys when you don't even input a username to login, the latest Yubikey has a limit of 100 but other vendors hold more.

Physical hardware keys work across most devices and browsers as long as you have the key with you.

Passkey is literally a software emulation of a yubikey.

Passkey is a security key used as password. Yubikey implements security key in hardware, it can store passkeys. Password managers implement security key in software, they can store passkeys.

fido already have ways to say a site only accepts google and apple keys.

you're deluding yourself. yubikey will be only for Enterprise when deployment hits the larger public.

how do you figure? It is a completely open ecosystem. You can choose whichever credential manager you want.

What? I'm quite sure I can login with passkeys stored i 1Password from my Linux laptop.

for now. the passkey provider is part of the attestation choices.

> The design of passkeys is pretty solidly based around the idea that users are the weakest link the system and need to be protected from themselves.

What happened to actually educating users instead?

(And not undermining your own security advices by making legitimate sites look like phishing sites)

> What happened to actually educating users instead?

I’m against passkeys for all the usual reasons, but people have been trying to educate end users for decades now. The lessons don’t always stick, and new users are being made every year.

how can I "use a good password that enforces origin binding"? Is this accomplished on the user side or by the provider?

Yes - title should be "Passkeys are just passwords your granddad and the websites he visits can't stuff up". Passkeys will do for authentication what TLS did for transport.

Until he messes something up and loses all his passkeys.

FIDO2 is already a mess: it takes an excellent model (U2F / physical custody) and makes it worse in ways ranging from annoying to dangerous:

- in the typical mundane case, its prescriptive about a PIN with the well-known bad outcomes on that

- in the limit case, a bad guy who has already demonstrated a willingness to steal your credential now needs to threaten harm to get what he wants

There's a reason bank tellers can't open the vault and a reason everyone knows that.

Physical custody (U2F) is intuitive, maps extremely well onto existing infrastructure (everyone has keys for their car and home), scalable in security (safes are common, well understood, and can be made arbitrarily secure).

So by the time you're at FIDO2 / demand a pin? Already user hostile. Strictly lockout increasing, strictly violence incentivizing.

Moving right along, Webauthn could mandate trivial portability as a QR code, TOTP style seed, a zillion ways. Nope: vendor lock in battle (FireFox overlays its password thing on the same pixrls that the Proton or BitWarden one does that I turned on!).

None of this is about security, none of it is about safety, none of it is about welfare.

It's about money.

> If a sophisticated attacker wanted to target an organiztion with passwords/push auth,

... it can target the Remote Code Executor: the web browser. /s

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