Authenticator implementations who allow exports outside of the vendor cartel are threatened to be blacklisted: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
> My primary hardware key can be from a completely different vendor than the backup one, so I don't quite buy the conspiracy angle.
The fundamental flaw is that enrolling an authenticator requires it to be present, making a backup strategy much less resilient as it means your secondary device needs to be constantly present and thus exposed to the same local/environmental risks the primary one is (theft/fire/faulty USB port that fries everything plugged in and you only realize after nuking both your keys). It makes an offline backup scenario like with SSH (where you copy a public key and otherwise leave the authenticator out of reach in a safe place) impossible.
Making it hard/impractical to maintain a reliable backup yourself sure makes those proprietary sync-based services attractive, which also doubles as reducing security since key material is being synced and can potentially be extracted (impossible with a true HSM + PKI implementation).
> preventing anyone from creating "paired" hardware authenticators
Don't certain types of keys involve writing something to the authenticator, fundamentally preventing this (as the backup authenticator won't get this written value)?
> cabal
It doesn't have to be explicit coordinated action like intentionally wanting to prevent people from self-managing passkeys (in fact any hint of it being intentional would be a liability in a potential anti-trust situation, so that's a big no-no); it can be done by simply omitting this scenario, by accident or for "security" purposes, or deprioritizing it to hell. In fact the Credential Migration spec is still a draft and appears quite recent, despite passkeys being heavily promoted for a while: https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxp-v1.0-wd-20241003.html - you'd think that such as basic feature would be sorted before the push to switch to passkeys no?
In fact you see this exact strategy playing out: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/11363#iss...
> For the initial delivery of Credential Exchange, we focused on the most wide use case [emphasis mine]
"Initial" delivery focuses on the most widespread use-case (how convenient it also happens to be the most corporation-friendly use-case), with everything else coming "later", meaning never. I'm sure it'll rot in some Jira backlog as a liability shield so they can promise they did plan for it and just never got around to it, but everyone understands it will never actually get implemented.