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Portability is still an unsolved problem, no matter how often FIDO Advocates say that it's solved (no 1Password is not actually portable, migration still isn't
by danShumway 4y ago
Portability is still an unsolved problem, no matter how often FIDO Advocates say that it's solved (no 1Password is not actually portable, migration still isn't built into the spec as far as I can tell).
I'm always happy to be proven wrong with this. Let me know if I can today (not maybe in the future, but right now) pull down an Open Source codebase onto my Linux computer, compile it myself without submitting some kind of validation check to a 3rd-party that will sign the code, and then batch export from an iPhone/iCloud account into that program so I can use it as provider without individually signing into any of those accounts.
If not, then it's not portable. And that's why people (at the very least people like me) aren't using it, because it's transparently an opportunity to increase vendor lock-in and to allow services to dictate that I can only log into previously client-agnostic accounts using a small set of proprietary platforms. I know that's not the intention of the FIDO Alliance, but their intention doesn't matter if the end result is the same.
Passwords do legitimately have a ton of problems and there is a theoretical version of Passkeys that would be amazing that I would be praising if it existed today. It's not that the idea is bad, there are changes to the standard that could be made that would make this good -- some of them would be controversial, some of them would make security purists upset. We'd need to have a conversation about what hardware attestation is actually going to be used for on a mass-market. But it could happen, it's not that passkeys are inherently bad.
But you will have to drag me kicking and screaming away from a format that is client-agnostic and inherently portable into an authentication mechanism that trivially enables vendor lock-in. Don't tell me about what companies might do in the future, the companies launched products in the present that don't support migration. Fix that, and then I'll listen to conversations about how Passkey/WebAuthn is better.