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Hacker News Hacker NewsPeople wrongly think passkeys are like Bitcoin wallets, where losing them means there's absolutely nothing you can do, your account is simply lost forever.
Losing a passkey is exactly like losing your password, which is to say, that for 99% of services, you can reset your password/passkey really easily. There's a prominent "Reset Password" button right on the login form. It sends you an email or an SMS, you click it, and it lets you reset right then and there. You can reset your passkey in exactly the same way.
It is not that easy to reset if you lose your password to your Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. They all have a bunch of factors that they use to authenticate you if you reset your password, and they don't even document which ones they use.
So, if you care about those accounts, you've got to make sure you have backup access. They all let you generate and print "backup codes" (emergency passwords) and store them in a fireproof safe or a literal bank vault. Do that!
As everybody knows, you can't store all of your passwords in a password manager. You need something outside of the password manager to login to the manager itself. That's why 1Password/LastPass is called that; you still need one last password that you keep and manage yourself.
That's true of passkeys, too. You can login to Google with passkey, but if Google is your password manager that stores your passkey, you need something else outside of Google's password manager to login to Google. Whether it's a password, a backup code, a YubiKey, whatever, you need one more thing to login to Google, ideally more than one, so you can back it up and keep it safe.
>The unfortunate piece is that your product choices can have both positive and negative impacts on the ecosystem as a whole. I've already heard rumblings that KeepassXC is likely to be featured in a few industry presentations that highlight security challenges with passkey providers
1. Passkey prompts asking if I want to use a phone or security key when I only have one (or neither!) registered. The UI for this gets in the way and should only ever present itself if I happen to have both kinds of devices registered.
2. Passkeys should have had the portability and flexibility that ssh keys have from the start. Making it so your grandparents can use public key cryptography and gain a significant advantage in securing their accounts in a user friendly manner should have been the priority. Seems like vendor lock-in was the goal from the start.
Until service providers are no longer allowed to:
1) force the type of passkey stores used (e.g. hardware vs software) when I am providing the passkey store
2) force me to MFA (e.g. forcing touch ID, entering pin or unlock password, etc) when attempting to use a passkey
Stop the insanity.
Succumbing to lock-in can smooth some (but not all) rough edges and creates it's own restrictions and risks.
TOTP for the win --- it's the simpler practical alternative.
I have yet to see any solid, significant evidence that passkeys are materially more secure than a random 32-character password + TOTP 2FA.
If a site or app refuses to let me create my own login and forces me to use a provider, I’m not going to be a customer under any circumstances.
If a site or app refuses to let me use a password+TOTP combination (as in, it forces passkeys), I am similarly out.
That’s not to say I don’t use passkeys. I have them on my Microsoft accounts, for one. But that is only after I have fully set up the account, and that the account plays very nice with the Microsoft Authenticator app, even going so far as to do challenge-response auth in coordination with the app, and plumping TOTP up to 8 characters.
Will I switch to passkeys elsewhere? Not for some time to come. My passwords make use of the entire two-byte UTF-8 character set, in that less than ½ of all characters typically generated can be found on a U.S. keyboard. So long as websites don’t restrict password length to moronically short values, a 32-character password with 2,048 possibilities for every character ought to be reasonably difficult to crack.
And then, of course, comes TOTP 2FA.
I also think there's still an enormous ignorance from passkey devs that lots of people want to occasionally log into personal services from locked down corporate machines, and the flow to deal this is at best terrible but more often non-existent, and developers with typically enhanced privileges just aren't able to conceive how difficult this is.
As a tech-savvy user fully aware of the underlying machinations involved with passkeys, I greatly prefer their simple, fast login experience over: username submit password submit TOTP submit, and especially over the much-worse "we've emailed you a code" login slog.
On Apple devices I get neat experience out of the box, on Linux (+Firefox) I forced to use Bitwarden because Mozilla is being Mozilla.
Never had any issues ever with passkeys.
I dont want to use google/apple/microsoft for any credential manager because: google is evil; apple has locked me out of my apple id (and lost things like the recordings of conversations with my father during his hospice); microsoft keeps getting worse and more annoying to use.
So ok, I need some credential manager. I used keepass previously... but how do I vet other credential managers? I dont want an online backup. I want my credentials to only be on my computers. So now I gotta learn about which apps are ok, don't have cloud synching, can export files, and be compatible with MacOS.
And I have to learn what is FIDO? Like FICO? why do I need to synch with FIDO? what is it? will it give my credential store to others?
How is this easier or more convenient than a user/pass with 2fa?
I feel like I am going to accidentally leak my credentials and have no way of knowing
I’m a technical guy, but I really don’t understand what the fuck is going on when I use a passkey. All I know is one day it appeared as an option and it let me login to things. I don’t really understand where it lives, what device it’s tied to, how scanning a QR code on Google Chrome on my phone magically logs me in, etc etc.
The user was not educated on this. Hacker News is the top 1% of computer power users. You gotta understand to someone’s grandma or mom or brother who works in real estate none of this makes any sense nor will they educate themselves on what it is.
Passkeys, stored in Bitwarden, give a lot of the same convenience, but without the vendor lock-in. We shouldn't be scaring people away from passkeys, when commonly used alternatives are much worse.
Since it's been a few days, sometimes I am logged out of either bank/traders and also the password manager.
So it's open the bank site, click on login/password, password manager browser extension asks to login. Type password manager password. It asks for 2FA. Unlock phone with face. Find app, open app, unlock app with face. Approve password manager login. Click on bank login/password again. I am in! No, bank wants to 2FA with mobile. Unlock phone with face. Open bank mobile app, unlock with face. Get code or approve login. Back to computer, type code or click approve.
Repeat that 12 times for all the accounts, and by the end of it I have neck pain with all the "pick up phone to face unlock" motions.
I am a bit paranoid so I turn on 2FA and passkeys and whatnot, but all of this makes me want to use `123password` everywhere and never change it.
Take a look:
That said, if you have a mac with a fingerprint scanner they sure are very convenient option.
And don't get me started on terrible vendors like Rippling that only support a single passkey! Madness.
1. First I get redirected to a special sign-in page.
2. Then I sign-in with my email only.
3. Then it finally asks me for a password, even for services that would never reasonably use SSO or have another post-email receive process.
4. Then I get redirected again to enter 2fa.
5. Then these websites ask if I want to create a passkey. No, I never want to create a passkey, and you keep asking me anyway.
6. Then, and only then, do I get to finally go back to using the service I wanted, and by then, you've lost whatever my `?originalUrl=` was, and I have to find it again.
No, don't send me a magic link. Because then I have to go do 4 more steps with Gmail or another mailbox provider and now signing in has become 10 or more steps.
No, don't tell me getting rid of passwords will help most of the population, and then force all of us to do the above, and blatantly lie to us that it's better.
Stop it. Get some help.