> as soon as passkeys started popping up the endgame became clear
That's why I'm 100% against passkeys. I'll never use them and I'll make sure nobody I know does.
They're just a lock-in mechanism.
That's why I'm 100% against passkeys. I'll never use them and I'll make sure nobody I know does.
They're just a lock-in mechanism.
Before the branding they were known as FIDO2 "discoverable credentials" or "resident keys".
Two things have changed with the rebrand:
1. A lot of platforms are adopting support for FIDO2 resident keys. This is good actually.
2. A lot of large companies have set themselves up as providers of FIDO2 resident keys without export or migration mechanisms. This is the vendor lock-in part (no export feature), but it's not a feature of the underlying tech itself.
Fwiw FIDO are actively working on some standard for exporting/importing keys so that's something.
If you want to use passkeys without lockin, just use Bitwarden or KeepPassXC - they all have full support. Or you can also store a limited number of passkeys on your FIDO2-compatible hardware key like Yubikey or the open-source Nitrokeys.
I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate representation of the request? At least from a quick skim the claimed issue is being able to export keys in plaintext. For example, from the issue author:
> I strongly recommend you temporarily disable this feature or at a minimum require file protection/encryption.
And later:
> > Besides, determined advanced users could just write code to decrypt the kdbx file and extract the passkeys anyway.
> That's fine. Let determined people do that, but don't make it easy for a user to be tricked into handing over all of their credentials in clear text.
> I don't quite understand why requiring file protection/encryption can't be a temporary minimum bar here.
To me that doesn't sound like they're requiring a proprietary format. Something like AES encrypted JSON sounds like it'd work as well, and that sounds pretty "open" to me?
Has there even, ever, been an instance of that happening?
There's an entire subsection of the security industry dedicated to this happening. The DefCon international security conference holds an on-stage competition where security researchers demonstrate this happening to real targets in real time in front of a live audience.
Of making people export all their credentials from a password manager and send them to a scammer?
I've complained about this GH exchange in the past and have come to understand that Apple is also part of the alliance, and the entire concept of blocking software-only password managers is just dead outside of enterprise situations where they mandate the hardware/software anyway. Mr. Cappalli might disagree, but he and his employer do not have the power to change this without breaking the standard and throwing away over a decade of work.
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There's levels to appropriate paranoia around these things of course. SSH private keys are stored in plaintext for millions of engineers around the world - sometimes probably even passed around through unsecured emails or whatnot I would guess. They're still largely more secure than user:pass on aggregate, despite that rather major peril.
So ultimately, plaintext creds are not necessarily catastrophic. But still - imo - something worth concerted effort to dissuade at least at early stages of standards' implementation.
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Edit: also, looks like the outcome of that thread was ultimately that KeepassXC have opted to implement the spec as per[0]. Good outcome to a good request.
[0] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/11363
The large adoption of those devices and standards did not lower the price.
They probably just banked on the enterprise market where every CISO was pressured to tick the hardware/2FA checkbox. And is then gonna allow to use the Microsoft/Google "software" one because it is hard to manage otherwise.
It's also become a much more niche product as software based (and/or primary-device-hardware-based) solutions have evolved & improved. & niche costs more.
All that said I'm really not sure why they've been so quiet on new series releases.
It is true about the size.
Sill I do not understand the price difference between 5C Nano [0] and the PIN+ Mini-C [1]. 3 to 4 times more expensive depending on the currency.
- [0] https://www.yubico.com/pt/product/yubikey-5-series/yubikey-5...
- [1] https://www.token2.com/shop/product/pin-mini-c-release3-1-fi...
Lots of services that don't support passkeys currently require remote attestation. Boycotting passkeys (an open, possibly beneficial tech that doesn't require remote attestation) will not prevent bad actors from requiring remote attestation (with or without passkeys).
Passkeys have many benefits over current alternatives for auth, & the inclusion of remote attestation doesn't make them worse than current auth because all current auth can be coupled to remote attestation.
Continue to oppose remote attestation but do use Passkeys. They're a massive improvement.
You can choose not to do this, and that's fine. Hardware attestation is dead because Apple refuses to implement it, so no one can force you to.
These days I would explore the TPM option, but I'm worried that has less legal teeth than a physical key if I'm in a law enforcement situation.
There's also practicality; I really, really don't want to tell my boss that TSA or whoever had access to the company git repositories and databases for X minutes or hours, and that's sidestepped by checking a bag with the Yubikey (wastes their time) or mailing it to the destination (needs a warrant).
If there were anything better and as easy to use as Chrome, I'd switch.