7 ms·

Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap

50 points by mikece 3y ago

Filligree 3y ago
On which note, Bitwarden supports these as well -- and works on all the mentioned platforms. Of course I don't think it gets the platform access needed to actually log in using passkeys on iphones, but I feel that should be Apple's problem, not mine.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  Bitwarden doesn't support certain important things regarding passkeys. [0] Q: Will passkeys be included if you clone a vault item? A: Bitwarden will not copy a passkey when completing a clone action. Q: Are stored passkeys included in Bitwarden imports and exports? A: Passkeys imports and exports will be included in a future release. Q: Can I store passkeys in the mobile app? A: Passkeys support for mobile applications is planned for a future release. The lack of support for exporting them is especially problematic. KeepassXC has that feature. [0] https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/#passkey-management-faq https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/#passkey-managem...
valenterry 3y ago
I can't even register more than 1 yubikey in almost any service that I use. We are faaar away from easy, secure and also robust authentication in the web. On top of that, I don't like big central services to control my authentication and collect data about me. Thank you, but until we arrive there, I'm happy to stick to my password manager. This post just comfirms my impressions.
- valenterry 3y ago
  Oh and to expand on that. I like to be able to setup my own authentication without having having to rely on 3rd party software, just in case. Relying on cryptographic hashes (for password hashing) is already kind of bad, but at least there are open source libraries who are hopefully checked by professionals on regular basis.
- taeric 3y ago
  Most places, I thought, finally allow multiple keys? Who is left not doing it?
  - valenterry 3y ago
    All 3 of my (german) banks for example. One bank here (N26) even only allows a single(!) smartphone for 2FA. So if I lose my phone... well, screw me.
    - taeric 3y ago
      I was curious if it was going to be banks. I don't think any of my banks allow yubikeys, yet. Will have to look into that.
      - mderazon 3y ago
        Banks are especially bad. I know one bank that has you memorize 7 digits access codes and for authentication asks 4 digits at random places each time.
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  I'm with you. Using a password manager is brain-dead simple nowadays. Gone are the days of syncing KeePass databases on cloud drives. Bitwarden is completely free and reliable, for example. Autofill works on all major browsers on both mobile and PC. The real problem here is user ignorance and apathy. We can try to force things down users' throats but they literally do not care about robust account security practices. They'll just lose the dongle or key or whatever you give them anyway, which will force some kind of centralized approach that introduces its own drawbacks (e.g., being deplatformed or canceled).
ivlad 3y ago
For our corp environment we initially embraced software-backed FIDO authenticators (aka passkeys), but now I am almost ready to start enforcing only hardware authenticators via attestation. The worst offender is (of course!) Google. In Chrome they bend the interface as much as they could to lure people into using Android as a key holder (and to sync it later on) even when platform authentication is available. Apple was very unfriendly by making their WebAuthn API private, so Safari used Keychain, Chrome did not have access to it (and forced Android) and Firefox only could use Yubikeys. And now password managers are jumping into this, so when a user tries to enroll the device in a browser with password manager extension (looking at you, Bitwarden) on a platform with software authenticators good luck finding the right combination of clicks to choose Yubikey. Enshittification of FIDO auth happened unbelievably fast.
danpalmer 3y ago
So, platform default implementations are too platform specific, and a cross-platform third-party option is cross-platform? Shocking. 1Password also does this well, but without the moral judgement.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  Disclaimer: I am and have been a 1Password user for years. I wish 1Password would include the moral judgement. Had they done that, they might have given me control over my passkeys, including the ability to export them.
- danShumway 3y ago
  1Password does not support platform export/import. It works on multiple OSes -- that's not what ProtonPass is talking about here. They're talking about moving passkeys between services -- ie moving passkeys from 1Password into a different password manager. 1Password does not have a way to do that.
throwaway74432 3y ago
I big part missing from this conversation is what happens when you lose a device, want to leave an auth platform, or are deplatformed. I don't want my credentials to be locked into any vendor, be it Apple, Google, or Proton. I currently use email + passwords + yubikeys. My credentials aren't dependent on some passkey auth server working correctly, or device that I don't control or have copies of. If Google or Apple wanted to ban me without recourse, in theory it wouldn't affect my ability to use other services. This doesn't appear to be the case with passkeys.
- temp0826 3y ago
  I really like that I can use 1Password for this. My biggest gripe is that it doesn't quite work yet in my main use case (Kagi's Orion on iOS. Ideally it would use Apple's API, not the 1Password browser extension, to use the OS setting that is set to use passkeys from 1Password rather than the iCloud keychain. I'm not precisely sure where the process is broken; but it doesn't work that way nor with the browser extension.)
- taeric 3y ago
  This pretty much has to be solved using a legal framework? Specifically because the questions get even harder when you ask the tough ones. What happens when you die and your estate needs to be closed out? If you don't have a process in place for that, then you are ultimately assuming any digitally controlled assets can be destroyed by lack of access. And if you have assumed that, then you are also presuming some time frame on access?
- protonpass 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! You can currently export and reimport passkeys in Proton Pass (for backups) and as soon as an industry standard is finalized, we'll support that format too.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eykanal 3y ago
So, IIUC, passkeys are a form of public key authentication. You register a public key with a service and then prove you have the private key. It sounds like this article is blaming "big tech" for not creating a universal, seamless, transparent private key sharing mechanism. That seems... silly? As a user, sure, I'd like to share my private keys around, and maybe one day we'll get there. However, exporting keys manually—which is what it sounds like proton is doing—sounds pretty sucky as well from a user experience standpoint. Now instead of having a password, I have a bunch of private keys that I have to manage and do... something... with on different services. This article would do well to acknowledge that this is a very hard problem rather than just ring the "big tech suxxorz" bell again.
- jsnell 3y ago
  This is content marketing. Rule number one is to find some kind of angle that can generate viral engagement no matter how thin the actual content is. Outrage tends to be a good hook. Acknowledging something as a hard problem, not so much.
- ivlad 3y ago
  Nope. Non-resident keys work differently. You register the public key with the service, then you encrypt the private key (via wrapping but that’s beyond the point here) with private key stored on your hardware token and send the encrypted blob to the service, too. When you need to authenticate, service sends you the encrypted blob, you decrypt it using the key on hardware token and obtain the private key. Than you do (more or less traditional) public key authentication. So, you don’t need to manage your private keys. Services do it for you.
  - taeric 3y ago
    The point is many players are trying to find ways for your private key to be portable, too? Yes, it is a basic public key share to the services you are authenticating with, but it is how to maintain convenience at the user's side that is posing difficulties. Indeed, the first real criticism in the post is "For example, if you create a passkey on your iPhone, it easily syncs to Mac devices but is incredibly difficult to use on a Windows device." It is the private key that they are syncing to all of your devices. And they do that for you because they control all of the places that they sync. I think you can make the case that they should not sync this off device for you, but then you are in the "what happens when my device is lost/broken/stolen?" You could also argue that they should let you export the key. But then you are back into the "credentials are easily stolen."
literallycancer 3y ago
Is there any way in which a passkey is better than a U2F hardware key?
- Filligree 3y ago
  You don't need to carry around a U2F hardware key, and it's less likely to break. I've lost count of the number of yubikeys that have broken off in the USB port of my laptop(s).
samcat116 3y ago
Aren’t a bunch of these claims just factually false? Chrome on macOS doesn’t use iCloud keychains passkeys like this article says they’re forced to do.
- protonpass 3y ago
  Hi there, from: https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/supported-environments https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/supported-en... "Chrome on macOS 13.5 and later can use iCloud Keychain to store passkeys. Passkeys in iCloud Keychain are synchronized across the user's Apple devices and can be used by other browsers and apps. Chrome on macOS can also store passkeys in a local profile, which means they aren't synchronized to other devices. Storing passkeys in a local profile is available in earlier versions of macOS."
taeric 3y ago
I find the general idea in this quote hard for me to swallow: "And passkeys can’t suffer mass exposure like passwords because apps and websites only store the public key — the private key remains safely stored on your device. If everyone used passkeys, much of the harmful effects of data breaches would disappear." If a service can sync your passkey between devices, then by definition it can be copied off. And if it can be copied off, then it can also be caught in a data breach. And as soon as your passkey can be part of a data breach, we seem largely back where we started? What am I missing? Is it better than it was? Almost assuredly. But a large part of the annoyances brought up in this post are specifically to limit breach exposure. Apple wants to make sure any keys it has synced can only be lost by a breach at Apple. Same for Google. If this is opened up to allow syncing by other actors, each other actor in the chain is now a potential breach, no?
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Passkey private keys are encrypted at rest, even on the user's device. You typically need a PIN, password, or biometric to unlock the private key for authentication. Getting your hands on a sync data breach won't do you much good because each user's encrypted blob (containing the private keys) has its own decryption key. It's not 100% fool-proof, but it's a huge improvement over password-based authentication. Remember, security is a "better than" game.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Right, that part I largely get. At least, I think I do. Such that if I am saying something that is off in that, please correct me. My question is basically, as soon as they are exportable across devices, then you are trusting the encryption of every actor involved, no? Such that, if there was a process to share from Google to any other company involved, then that means any company involved could be breached and the key compromised. You could do time bound shares. But, that is ultimately going to fall back on access to Google being what secures you. Right? (And replace Google with Apple for the same general scenarios.) Now, Yubikeys worked by never letting you get the private key off the device. As such, if you lose the device, you can no longer use those secrets to authenticate. Solution then, was to have multiple keys all configured such that you would have to lose all of them. If you needed to reestablish a brand new set of keys, you had to do that in another way. At companies, this was largely done by doing it in front of an IT person that should either know you, or validated some other identification. (A bank would similarly require you to be there in person with government ID.) What is the article's proposed way of letting you share passkeys at will across devices and companies, that doesn't largely compromise the security?
account-5 3y ago
I remember the passkey topic coming up a lot a couple of years ago, my problems with them were the same as detailed in the article. I said I wouldn't use them until I could have a cross platform open source free version. Luckily keepassxc now supports them. I'll adopt way further down the line though.
- protonpass 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Passkeys also provide the benefit of being phishing resistant and will only work on the originating website.
danShumway 3y ago
Thanks for writing this, I've been complaining and trying to get attention on this problem for somewhere close to a year and I feel like with so much of the completely uncritical coverage of passkeys I was disconnected from reality or something. Portability is a huge issue for passkeys and the lack of communication about it as well as the lack of prioritization is holding passkeys back. ---- A few weeks ago there was a virtual tech summit for the FIDO alliance which had a tech-talk on the state of portability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mje6J2IMRTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mje6J2IMRTY It is from what I can tell the only resource going over plans for portability to this level of detail. I'm hugely grateful to the presenters who even went out of their way to answer a few of my questions when I emailed them -- seriously, thank you. But it's frustrating to have questions about portability years after passkeys became a thing and to have a 30 minute video be the best resource online for learning more. Hopefully that will change in the future, my understanding is that a rough draft spec is coming soon. But the process up until this point has been frustratingly vague and impossible to follow from the outside, and I'm still left asking why portability wasn't considered a pre-condition to launching passkeys and advertising them to ordinary users for regular usage. I'm hoping things get better once the draft spec is released, I want to be wrong about passkeys. I want them to be something I can support and advocate for. It's because passkeys have so much potential that it's frustrating seeing them fall over in this way, and it's frustrating to see trends that make me feel like the entire standard is being developed mostly by companies without the kind of serious input from user-advocates or transparency about spec process that is necessary for a full password replacement.
- protonpass 3y ago
  You can already export and reimportant passkeys in Proton Pass and as soon as an industry-wide export format is standardized, we'll support that too.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    KeepassXC too, and I think Strongbox(?) is trying to support interop with 3rd-parties -- if anyone from Strongbox is around, you should add support for Proton Pass's format. That's been the encouraging part in this -- 3rd-party passkey providers stepping up and saying that export/interop is important to them and that they're not going to launch without it regardless of where the standard currently is -- so again, thanks for taking that stance :)

50 points by mikece 3y ago

On which note, Bitwarden supports these as well -- and works on all the mentioned platforms. Of course I don't think it gets the platform access needed to actually log in using passkeys on iphones, but I feel that should be Apple's problem, not mine.

cassianoleal 3y ago
Bitwarden doesn't support certain important things regarding passkeys. [0] Q: Will passkeys be included if you clone a vault item? A: Bitwarden will not copy a passkey when completing a clone action. Q: Are stored passkeys included in Bitwarden imports and exports? A: Passkeys imports and exports will be included in a future release. Q: Can I store passkeys in the mobile app? A: Passkeys support for mobile applications is planned for a future release. The lack of support for exporting them is especially problematic. KeepassXC has that feature. [0] https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/#passkey-management-faq https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/#passkey-managem...

valenterry 3y ago

I can't even register more than 1 yubikey in almost any service that I use. We are faaar away from easy, secure and also robust authentication in the web. On top of that, I don't like big central services to control my authentication and collect data about me. Thank you, but until we arrive there, I'm happy to stick to my password manager. This post just comfirms my impressions.

valenterry 3y ago
Oh and to expand on that. I like to be able to setup my own authentication without having having to rely on 3rd party software, just in case. Relying on cryptographic hashes (for password hashing) is already kind of bad, but at least there are open source libraries who are hopefully checked by professionals on regular basis.
taeric 3y ago
Most places, I thought, finally allow multiple keys? Who is left not doing it?
- valenterry 3y ago
  All 3 of my (german) banks for example. One bank here (N26) even only allows a single(!) smartphone for 2FA. So if I lose my phone... well, screw me.
  - taeric 3y ago
    I was curious if it was going to be banks. I don't think any of my banks allow yubikeys, yet. Will have to look into that.
    - mderazon 3y ago
      Banks are especially bad. I know one bank that has you memorize 7 digits access codes and for authentication asks 4 digits at random places each time.
nathanaldensr 3y ago
I'm with you. Using a password manager is brain-dead simple nowadays. Gone are the days of syncing KeePass databases on cloud drives. Bitwarden is completely free and reliable, for example. Autofill works on all major browsers on both mobile and PC. The real problem here is user ignorance and apathy. We can try to force things down users' throats but they literally do not care about robust account security practices. They'll just lose the dongle or key or whatever you give them anyway, which will force some kind of centralized approach that introduces its own drawbacks (e.g., being deplatformed or canceled).

ivlad 3y ago

For our corp environment we initially embraced software-backed FIDO authenticators (aka passkeys), but now I am almost ready to start enforcing only hardware authenticators via attestation. The worst offender is (of course!) Google. In Chrome they bend the interface as much as they could to lure people into using Android as a key holder (and to sync it later on) even when platform authentication is available. Apple was very unfriendly by making their WebAuthn API private, so Safari used Keychain, Chrome did not have access to it (and forced Android) and Firefox only could use Yubikeys. And now password managers are jumping into this, so when a user tries to enroll the device in a browser with password manager extension (looking at you, Bitwarden) on a platform with software authenticators good luck finding the right combination of clicks to choose Yubikey. Enshittification of FIDO auth happened unbelievably fast.

danpalmer 3y ago

So, platform default implementations are too platform specific, and a cross-platform third-party option is cross-platform? Shocking. 1Password also does this well, but without the moral judgement.

cassianoleal 3y ago
Disclaimer: I am and have been a 1Password user for years. I wish 1Password would include the moral judgement. Had they done that, they might have given me control over my passkeys, including the ability to export them.
danShumway 3y ago
1Password does not support platform export/import. It works on multiple OSes -- that's not what ProtonPass is talking about here. They're talking about moving passkeys between services -- ie moving passkeys from 1Password into a different password manager. 1Password does not have a way to do that.

throwaway74432 3y ago

I big part missing from this conversation is what happens when you lose a device, want to leave an auth platform, or are deplatformed. I don't want my credentials to be locked into any vendor, be it Apple, Google, or Proton. I currently use email + passwords + yubikeys. My credentials aren't dependent on some passkey auth server working correctly, or device that I don't control or have copies of. If Google or Apple wanted to ban me without recourse, in theory it wouldn't affect my ability to use other services. This doesn't appear to be the case with passkeys.

temp0826 3y ago
I really like that I can use 1Password for this. My biggest gripe is that it doesn't quite work yet in my main use case (Kagi's Orion on iOS. Ideally it would use Apple's API, not the 1Password browser extension, to use the OS setting that is set to use passkeys from 1Password rather than the iCloud keychain. I'm not precisely sure where the process is broken; but it doesn't work that way nor with the browser extension.)
taeric 3y ago
This pretty much has to be solved using a legal framework? Specifically because the questions get even harder when you ask the tough ones. What happens when you die and your estate needs to be closed out? If you don't have a process in place for that, then you are ultimately assuming any digitally controlled assets can be destroyed by lack of access. And if you have assumed that, then you are also presuming some time frame on access?
protonpass 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! You can currently export and reimport passkeys in Proton Pass (for backups) and as soon as an industry standard is finalized, we'll support that format too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

eykanal 3y ago

So, IIUC, passkeys are a form of public key authentication. You register a public key with a service and then prove you have the private key. It sounds like this article is blaming "big tech" for not creating a universal, seamless, transparent private key sharing mechanism. That seems... silly? As a user, sure, I'd like to share my private keys around, and maybe one day we'll get there. However, exporting keys manually—which is what it sounds like proton is doing—sounds pretty sucky as well from a user experience standpoint. Now instead of having a password, I have a bunch of private keys that I have to manage and do... something... with on different services. This article would do well to acknowledge that this is a very hard problem rather than just ring the "big tech suxxorz" bell again.

jsnell 3y ago
This is content marketing. Rule number one is to find some kind of angle that can generate viral engagement no matter how thin the actual content is. Outrage tends to be a good hook. Acknowledging something as a hard problem, not so much.
ivlad 3y ago
Nope. Non-resident keys work differently. You register the public key with the service, then you encrypt the private key (via wrapping but that’s beyond the point here) with private key stored on your hardware token and send the encrypted blob to the service, too. When you need to authenticate, service sends you the encrypted blob, you decrypt it using the key on hardware token and obtain the private key. Than you do (more or less traditional) public key authentication. So, you don’t need to manage your private keys. Services do it for you.
- taeric 3y ago
  The point is many players are trying to find ways for your private key to be portable, too? Yes, it is a basic public key share to the services you are authenticating with, but it is how to maintain convenience at the user's side that is posing difficulties. Indeed, the first real criticism in the post is "For example, if you create a passkey on your iPhone, it easily syncs to Mac devices but is incredibly difficult to use on a Windows device." It is the private key that they are syncing to all of your devices. And they do that for you because they control all of the places that they sync. I think you can make the case that they should not sync this off device for you, but then you are in the "what happens when my device is lost/broken/stolen?" You could also argue that they should let you export the key. But then you are back into the "credentials are easily stolen."

literallycancer 3y ago

Is there any way in which a passkey is better than a U2F hardware key?

Filligree 3y ago
You don't need to carry around a U2F hardware key, and it's less likely to break. I've lost count of the number of yubikeys that have broken off in the USB port of my laptop(s).

samcat116 3y ago

Aren’t a bunch of these claims just factually false? Chrome on macOS doesn’t use iCloud keychains passkeys like this article says they’re forced to do.

protonpass 3y ago
Hi there, from: https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/supported-environments https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/supported-en... "Chrome on macOS 13.5 and later can use iCloud Keychain to store passkeys. Passkeys in iCloud Keychain are synchronized across the user's Apple devices and can be used by other browsers and apps. Chrome on macOS can also store passkeys in a local profile, which means they aren't synchronized to other devices. Storing passkeys in a local profile is available in earlier versions of macOS."

taeric 3y ago

I find the general idea in this quote hard for me to swallow: "And passkeys can’t suffer mass exposure like passwords because apps and websites only store the public key — the private key remains safely stored on your device. If everyone used passkeys, much of the harmful effects of data breaches would disappear." If a service can sync your passkey between devices, then by definition it can be copied off. And if it can be copied off, then it can also be caught in a data breach. And as soon as your passkey can be part of a data breach, we seem largely back where we started? What am I missing? Is it better than it was? Almost assuredly. But a large part of the annoyances brought up in this post are specifically to limit breach exposure. Apple wants to make sure any keys it has synced can only be lost by a breach at Apple. Same for Google. If this is opened up to allow syncing by other actors, each other actor in the chain is now a potential breach, no?

the_snooze 3y ago
Passkey private keys are encrypted at rest, even on the user's device. You typically need a PIN, password, or biometric to unlock the private key for authentication. Getting your hands on a sync data breach won't do you much good because each user's encrypted blob (containing the private keys) has its own decryption key. It's not 100% fool-proof, but it's a huge improvement over password-based authentication. Remember, security is a "better than" game.
- taeric 3y ago
  Right, that part I largely get. At least, I think I do. Such that if I am saying something that is off in that, please correct me. My question is basically, as soon as they are exportable across devices, then you are trusting the encryption of every actor involved, no? Such that, if there was a process to share from Google to any other company involved, then that means any company involved could be breached and the key compromised. You could do time bound shares. But, that is ultimately going to fall back on access to Google being what secures you. Right? (And replace Google with Apple for the same general scenarios.) Now, Yubikeys worked by never letting you get the private key off the device. As such, if you lose the device, you can no longer use those secrets to authenticate. Solution then, was to have multiple keys all configured such that you would have to lose all of them. If you needed to reestablish a brand new set of keys, you had to do that in another way. At companies, this was largely done by doing it in front of an IT person that should either know you, or validated some other identification. (A bank would similarly require you to be there in person with government ID.) What is the article's proposed way of letting you share passkeys at will across devices and companies, that doesn't largely compromise the security?

account-5 3y ago

I remember the passkey topic coming up a lot a couple of years ago, my problems with them were the same as detailed in the article. I said I wouldn't use them until I could have a cross platform open source free version. Luckily keepassxc now supports them. I'll adopt way further down the line though.

protonpass 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Passkeys also provide the benefit of being phishing resistant and will only work on the originating website.

danShumway 3y ago

Thanks for writing this, I've been complaining and trying to get attention on this problem for somewhere close to a year and I feel like with so much of the completely uncritical coverage of passkeys I was disconnected from reality or something. Portability is a huge issue for passkeys and the lack of communication about it as well as the lack of prioritization is holding passkeys back. ---- A few weeks ago there was a virtual tech summit for the FIDO alliance which had a tech-talk on the state of portability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mje6J2IMRTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mje6J2IMRTY It is from what I can tell the only resource going over plans for portability to this level of detail. I'm hugely grateful to the presenters who even went out of their way to answer a few of my questions when I emailed them -- seriously, thank you. But it's frustrating to have questions about portability years after passkeys became a thing and to have a 30 minute video be the best resource online for learning more. Hopefully that will change in the future, my understanding is that a rough draft spec is coming soon. But the process up until this point has been frustratingly vague and impossible to follow from the outside, and I'm still left asking why portability wasn't considered a pre-condition to launching passkeys and advertising them to ordinary users for regular usage. I'm hoping things get better once the draft spec is released, I want to be wrong about passkeys. I want them to be something I can support and advocate for. It's because passkeys have so much potential that it's frustrating seeing them fall over in this way, and it's frustrating to see trends that make me feel like the entire standard is being developed mostly by companies without the kind of serious input from user-advocates or transparency about spec process that is necessary for a full password replacement.

protonpass 3y ago
You can already export and reimportant passkeys in Proton Pass and as soon as an industry-wide export format is standardized, we'll support that too.
- danShumway 3y ago
  KeepassXC too, and I think Strongbox(?) is trying to support interop with 3rd-parties -- if anyone from Strongbox is around, you should add support for Proton Pass's format. That's been the encouraging part in this -- 3rd-party passkey providers stepping up and saying that export/interop is important to them and that they're not going to launch without it regardless of where the standard currently is -- so again, thanks for taking that stance :)