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Comment by lelandbatey | Hacker News Reader

> This makes it impossible to copy and paste your passkey to the wrong person (someone trying to trick you).

It also, unfortunately, means it's not possible (via most passkey implementations) to back those passkeys up to paper. Which is quite unfortunate: backing up to paper is one of the most stable and human accessible ways of ensuring redundancy and continuity, an inevitable but also oft-ignored part of credential management.

Security folks would like to pretend "solving continuity" isn't a problem, or is a problem that doesn't need to be accessible.

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> back those passkeys up to paper

Is writing down passwords something people do? I have countless passwords saved over >20 years and I don’t think I’ve ever recorded one to paper. I even checked a couple of popular password management solutions and they don’t seem to have “print” functionality.

Yes, this is extremely common, both as a continuity means and/or as a localized password manager. Know someone who uses a Rolodex for hers, which is funny and yet it works.

Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.

Yes. Old people constantly do it, since they have no hope of remembering 15 passwords. Sometimes, they can barely remember 1 (one).

I've written down one: the master password for my Keepass database, along with instructions on how to get to and open that file. It's in a 'open if I'm no longer alive' envelope.

It is absolutely a thing people do. Google even offers a convenient printout as a way to provide account recovery.

> Is writing down passwords something people do?

Yes, it's pretty common.

The passphrase to my bitwarden database is in my will. And a bitlocker decryption key is right beside it.

Yes:

  Paranoid password printing with a Raspberry Pi
  https://7402.org/blog/2020/paranoid-password-printing-pi.html

It is what the vast majority of people do.

I doubt if that’s true since the vast majority of people no longer have printers. Not even the vast majority of online people.

Both pens and pencils exist.

I was not aware writing down a password required printers.

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