4 ms·

> Which consumer base has demanded enhanced security and convenience (for which passkeys are the proclaimed answer)? The non-tech crowd has no idea what it is a

> Which consumer base has demanded enhanced security and convenience (for which passkeys are the proclaimed answer)? The non-tech crowd has no idea what it is and is probably just hearing about it. The tech crowd on a forum like HN seems to be mostly against it because of issues with account recovery and cross-device use that passwords don’t pose. Yeah it's going to be mostly the tech crowd at this point, and it will filter down to non-tech people. And we will all be better off when we are all using passkeys. Looking at my girlfriend's computer her password situation is a nightmare of potentially compromised passwords, reuse of weak passwords, among other issues. Even after spending hours trying to clean it up there are still tons. If we were in a passkey only world then no more weak passwords for her to reuse, no chance of phishing said password from her. Even if the server gets hacked there is no password to get pwned. I really don't care what the contingent of passkey haters on here say. A lot of the discourse here isn't what it used to be. Little better than Reddit for techies. > From what I understand, it seems like passkeys may ultimately rely on SMS OTP or similar mechanisms for account recovery. The other likely result would be losing the account forever, especially if the user is a single device one (there are billions of such people around the world). That's not as I understand it. Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. If/When passwords are not a thing anymore then why wouldn't the recovery use a "lost password" type flow that happens is facilitated via the account email? > I’m going to wait it out a little longer to see how the interoperability factors play out in reality and learn from those who are braver than me. Fair enough, but you can add a passkey to an account and your password will still work. So it's not like it will cause any harm to try it. You can even remove passkeys from an account if you really don't want to use it. The worst thing about passkey support on Amazon is they didn't embrace it completely so you still have to go through all of the login form bullshit instead of being a one step biometric unlock that passkeys can enable.

stavros 3y ago
You're right about the level of discourse, and it's become especially obvious to me whenever there's a discussion about passkeys. Everyone keeps repeating the same debunked arguments over and over, with only maybe one argument (attestation) holding some water. It's too bad, I'm really excited about passkeys increasing authentication usability (and security second, for me), but most people here seem to want to hold on to passwords, as if they aren't both terrible UX and terrible security.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Attestation is a big barrier for self hosting which is the only way I'd adopt it. But afaik the biggest implementation of passkeys (Apple) doesn't support attestation so right now it's not a problem, nobody requires it in order not to lose all the Apple userbase. This may change in the future though. Another problem is no self hosted toolchain with full cross platform sync but hopefully it'll come.
  - stavros 3y ago
    > Attestation is a big barrier for self hosting which is the only way I'd adopt it. The issue I have with attestation it that I feel that I feel that we're saying "is it a problem?" "no, but it theoretically could be, so let's use passwords instead". I think that passkeys are better than passwords, even with attestation, and if it becomes a problem, we can complain about it then.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Attestation is a huge problem because it can be used to exclude self-hosted systems, which is the only way I would even consider using passkeys. I abhor "sign in with Google/Microsoft/Meta...etc" things too. For example the admins at my work refuse to "certify" any security keys other than yubikeys. And because those do support attestation it is not possible to circumvent it. For work it's not an issue, they will just have to supply me a key if they want me to use the damn thing, but I don't want consumer-focused sites to use it obviously. Attestation is inherently evil and anti-FOSS. I just won't opt in to it until attestation is gone, but thanks to iCloud not offering it, it is currently not demanded by any of the sites.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Attestation is basically gone – it doesn’t work with cloud sync, which is largely where things seem to be moving. My main concern at this point is user confusion, followed by platform lock-in. Or am I missing a way for users migrate from the Apple ecosystem to Google or vice versa, for example, without registering new passkeys for all of their accounts before they trade in their old device (or it breaks and they try to recover on another platform)? Not even 1Password supports exportable passkeys at this point. Apple even lets me easily share them across accounts (which seems like a huge risk!), but obviously not across ecosystems either.
kalleboo 3y ago
> That's not as I understand it. Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. I've been using passkeys on yahoo.co.jp for a while now after they prompted me to set it up. It works fine on my Mac, but for whatever reason it won't see the passkey on my phone - it just pops up a QR code dialog and says to scan it on another device (my only other device is my Mac which won't scan QR codes). iCloud Keychain is syncing fine - regular passwords on other sites work. Once that fails it drops back to SMS OTP. There is no option to log in with a password. So as far as I see it, Passkeys are still an experimental technology. Passwords suck so I hope one day they figure out how to get it working.
- vdelitz 3y ago
  Yes, the implementation is a challenge and the WebAuthn specs are even for experienced devs hard to understand (as it's an entirely new paradigm compared to other authentication methods). In your case with your phone, I suspect that Yahoo has implemented some kind of device management and works with the WebAuthn request option AllowedCredentials to allow only certain credentials on a device (here probably something was messed up).
michaelt 3y ago
> Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. > If/When passwords are not a thing anymore then why wouldn't the recovery use a "lost password" type flow that happens is facilitated via the account email? Well, passkeys are descended from FIDO/U2F keys, which have traditionally been used for "two factor authentication" - by confirming both 'something you have' and 'something you know' your account is protected if someone has shoulder-surfed your password, or stolen your phone, or hacked your e-mail, or whatever. And FIDO/U2F keys kinda a hassle, so they're only used by the most security-conscious people in the most security-critical situations. For these people, a recovery mechanism that falls back to a single factor (password-only login, e-mail only login) is a big weakness, security-wise.
danShumway 3y ago
> I really don't care what the contingent of passkey haters on here say. I think what a lot of passkey advocates misunderstand is that this isn't a debate about what passkeys should look like once everyone has adopted them. It's a discussion about whether passkeys will ever get adopted. Ordinary users are not going to use passkeys until these problems are solved. You're envisioning a world where everyone says, "there are tradeoffs, but we all made the switch and the security is better so tough luck." The reality is that fixing the tradeoffs are a precondition for passkeys to be a replacement for passwords. The same industry that was incapable of teaching people how to use real 2FA tokens is not going to be able to teach them how to clone passkeys across devices. The discussion around passkey problems is not a discussion about how many people will grumble when passkeys eventually break into the mainstream. It is a discussion about whether passkeys are ever going to break into the mainstream at all. ---- Note that passkeys themselves are a response to this reality: it used to be that everyone talked about how cloud synchronization within an ecosystem was just too insecure and critics were going to have to get over the fact that it wasn't supported. This was a common debate on HN. That changed, because it became obvious that passkeys were not going to happen without cloud sync and that roaming passkeys were a requirement, even if they made the standard slightly less secure. Now the same people are out saying that portability and better standardization among services is not the FIDO Alliance's problem to solve and people are just going to have to get over it. And I don't think y'all understand how standards get adopted. Ordinary users are not going to get over it, they're going to refuse to use the standard. The first time they use passkeys and run into Amazon telling them that they can't log in from Firefox, they're going to walk away from passkeys forever.
beej71 3y ago
> That's not as I understand it. Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. If we continue to do this, don't we then still just have all the same problems with passwords?

stavros 3y ago

You're right about the level of discourse, and it's become especially obvious to me whenever there's a discussion about passkeys. Everyone keeps repeating the same debunked arguments over and over, with only maybe one argument (attestation) holding some water. It's too bad, I'm really excited about passkeys increasing authentication usability (and security second, for me), but most people here seem to want to hold on to passwords, as if they aren't both terrible UX and terrible security.

wkat4242 3y ago
Attestation is a big barrier for self hosting which is the only way I'd adopt it. But afaik the biggest implementation of passkeys (Apple) doesn't support attestation so right now it's not a problem, nobody requires it in order not to lose all the Apple userbase. This may change in the future though. Another problem is no self hosted toolchain with full cross platform sync but hopefully it'll come.
- stavros 3y ago
  > Attestation is a big barrier for self hosting which is the only way I'd adopt it. The issue I have with attestation it that I feel that I feel that we're saying "is it a problem?" "no, but it theoretically could be, so let's use passwords instead". I think that passkeys are better than passwords, even with attestation, and if it becomes a problem, we can complain about it then.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Attestation is a huge problem because it can be used to exclude self-hosted systems, which is the only way I would even consider using passkeys. I abhor "sign in with Google/Microsoft/Meta...etc" things too. For example the admins at my work refuse to "certify" any security keys other than yubikeys. And because those do support attestation it is not possible to circumvent it. For work it's not an issue, they will just have to supply me a key if they want me to use the damn thing, but I don't want consumer-focused sites to use it obviously. Attestation is inherently evil and anti-FOSS. I just won't opt in to it until attestation is gone, but thanks to iCloud not offering it, it is currently not demanded by any of the sites.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Attestation is basically gone – it doesn’t work with cloud sync, which is largely where things seem to be moving. My main concern at this point is user confusion, followed by platform lock-in. Or am I missing a way for users migrate from the Apple ecosystem to Google or vice versa, for example, without registering new passkeys for all of their accounts before they trade in their old device (or it breaks and they try to recover on another platform)? Not even 1Password supports exportable passkeys at this point. Apple even lets me easily share them across accounts (which seems like a huge risk!), but obviously not across ecosystems either.

kalleboo 3y ago

> That's not as I understand it. Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. I've been using passkeys on yahoo.co.jp for a while now after they prompted me to set it up. It works fine on my Mac, but for whatever reason it won't see the passkey on my phone - it just pops up a QR code dialog and says to scan it on another device (my only other device is my Mac which won't scan QR codes). iCloud Keychain is syncing fine - regular passwords on other sites work. Once that fails it drops back to SMS OTP. There is no option to log in with a password. So as far as I see it, Passkeys are still an experimental technology. Passwords suck so I hope one day they figure out how to get it working.

vdelitz 3y ago
Yes, the implementation is a challenge and the WebAuthn specs are even for experienced devs hard to understand (as it's an entirely new paradigm compared to other authentication methods). In your case with your phone, I suspect that Yahoo has implemented some kind of device management and works with the WebAuthn request option AllowedCredentials to allow only certain credentials on a device (here probably something was messed up).

michaelt 3y ago

> Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. > If/When passwords are not a thing anymore then why wouldn't the recovery use a "lost password" type flow that happens is facilitated via the account email? Well, passkeys are descended from FIDO/U2F keys, which have traditionally been used for "two factor authentication" - by confirming both 'something you have' and 'something you know' your account is protected if someone has shoulder-surfed your password, or stolen your phone, or hacked your e-mail, or whatever. And FIDO/U2F keys kinda a hassle, so they're only used by the most security-conscious people in the most security-critical situations. For these people, a recovery mechanism that falls back to a single factor (password-only login, e-mail only login) is a big weakness, security-wise.

danShumway 3y ago

> I really don't care what the contingent of passkey haters on here say. I think what a lot of passkey advocates misunderstand is that this isn't a debate about what passkeys should look like once everyone has adopted them. It's a discussion about whether passkeys will ever get adopted. Ordinary users are not going to use passkeys until these problems are solved. You're envisioning a world where everyone says, "there are tradeoffs, but we all made the switch and the security is better so tough luck." The reality is that fixing the tradeoffs are a precondition for passkeys to be a replacement for passwords. The same industry that was incapable of teaching people how to use real 2FA tokens is not going to be able to teach them how to clone passkeys across devices. The discussion around passkey problems is not a discussion about how many people will grumble when passkeys eventually break into the mainstream. It is a discussion about whether passkeys are ever going to break into the mainstream at all. ---- Note that passkeys themselves are a response to this reality: it used to be that everyone talked about how cloud synchronization within an ecosystem was just too insecure and critics were going to have to get over the fact that it wasn't supported. This was a common debate on HN. That changed, because it became obvious that passkeys were not going to happen without cloud sync and that roaming passkeys were a requirement, even if they made the standard slightly less secure. Now the same people are out saying that portability and better standardization among services is not the FIDO Alliance's problem to solve and people are just going to have to get over it. And I don't think y'all understand how standards get adopted. Ordinary users are not going to get over it, they're going to refuse to use the standard. The first time they use passkeys and run into Amazon telling them that they can't log in from Firefox, they're going to walk away from passkeys forever.

beej71 3y ago

> That's not as I understand it. Why would SMS OTP be used? 100% of accounts today will already have a password, that's how you would login if you lose your only passkey device. If we continue to do this, don't we then still just have all the same problems with passwords?