this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Man, the amount of fearmongering and anti-Google rhetoric in this thread makes me sad. Passkeys are almost entirely a good thing and are supported by many big and small companies.
No, it won’t lock you into Google, it’s an open web standard. Google will have an Authenticator, Apple will, and third parties will spring up to support it as well. And there’s no lock in, you can get a new passkey when you want to switch devices or providers.
No, someone who gets access to your device can’t get access to everything if you have basic security hygeine. Secure your passkeys with a secondary password or use biometric authentication.
Yes, it’s almost a straight upgrade to text passwords. They are immune to phishing attacks and other social engineering tricks, and you don’t need to remember long strings of numbers and letters anymore.
Do your research people, sheesh.
This is starting to really get on my nerves, and I feel like discourse on the fediverse is worse; basically the attitude is that if it's not FOSS and self-hosted, it's shite. That attitude is fucking grating for the rest of us.
The irony is that it's an open standard. There are FOSS implementations you can self-host. Server side, client side, soft token, hard token. Everything.
https://github.com/herrjemand/awesome-webauthn
People on this thread are just really ignorant, even self-proclaimed security experts.
This and if any business anywhere manages to reache a significant level of success — and has the nerve to charge money for their service — it’s a sign that capitalism doesn’t work and corporations are inherently evil.
I just assume it’s an age thing.
Big tech have done this to themselves
An online authentication system is quite literally the one central thing your whole digital life depends up on. If it's broken, it can completely f'up your life and remove you from existence in the digital space. So there is extremely good reason to be skeptical when big-company tries to force you into a new thing. Especially when said big-companies have a history of f'n things up on purpose (remember G+ forcing real names on everybody and bundling previously unrelated accounts into one monolithic one?). Or take HTTPS, which was sold us with "bringing more security", when what it actually did was kill large chunks of the open and self-hosted Web.
Are you seriously arguing against HTTPS?
Yes. It's one of the major reasons why the Web turned into a cooperate controlled hellscape. Note, I am not arguing against encryption, just against HTTPS crappy implementation of it. It's also going to get even worse with QUIC.
HTTPS is definitely not a major reason the web turned corporate. It has its problems for sure though.
Look at Gemini if you want an example of a decent web ecosystem that has HTTPS as a requirement for the protocol.
Gemini benefits from two things that the web has lost:
The problem with passkeys is that surrender of a physical key is not protected by the 4th amendment and subject to seizure. From a security perspective, I agree that passkeys are good. But I only use a physical key as a secondary factor. Never a primary.
The courts have ruled that you can't be forced to give up a password or passcode. (We'll have to see if the current court will keep this precedent.)
Until we get better privacy protections, I'm not trusting passkeys whole cloth.
You can protect your passkeys with a knowledge element.
But I don't see your use case. Passkeys are about logging in to webservices, not about protecting devices.
Web service providers can always be ordered to surrender your data by a court. Very few of them even try to encrypt your data. And for those that do, a court order could still force them to intercept your password and decrypt the data.
If you replace passwords with passkeys that must be protected by a password, you haven’t replaced passwords, you’ve just moved where the attack can happen. While I think there’s certainly value in that, it’s very disingenuous to say you’ve replaced passwords.
Passkeys are used for more than web services and have the possibility to replace other security options elsewhere (being something you have, one of the three secrets possible). Their lack of protection, at least in the United States, is a very serious problem. Your points do nothing to address this and highlight just how bad the situation is.
You should really read up on multi-factor authentication and Web-Authn.
Your problem seems more that you don't trust Google to store your private keys in their cloud.
And that's fine. You don't have to do that. But don't be confused to think that's the only option. You can buy a yubikey or a Trezor model T if you prefer.
Passkeys are just a marketing term for Web-Authn. When you use asymmetric keys for other purposes, it's not passkeys.
I missed the part where I said I don’t trust Google. You seemed to have ignored everything of substance in my response, namely putting a password on the passkey doesn’t remove passwords and the extension of things like FIDO2 beyond web auth.
I didn't ignore it, I said you need to read up on the basics.
Protecting a private key with a password is totally different than authenticating with a password and you don't see to understand that difference.
It doesn’t get rid of passwords, which is what I said when I said it was a disingenuous claim. It just moves the attack surface, like I said before. You haven’t bothered to demonstrate even a passable understanding of my original comment and the security issues I raised as a security professional because you appear to want to dunk on me. I’ve been having this conversation for years so sorry not interested.
That suggestion up thread to read up on how webauthn/CTAP2/FIDO2 works?
It’s a good suggestion. I would take it.
I don’t think you know what an attack surface is.
I do. What part in particular worries you?
Sorry, you're just wrong. It does get rid of passwords as the authentication mechanism and replaces it with a private key.
Claiming otherwise is being ignorant on how it works.
Even if someone knows the password to your phone or yubikey, they still need your phone or yubikey. Knowing just the password is useless. If you are a security professional, you would know this is called a possession factor.
If you've been having this conversation for years, you really ought to know better.
I don’t think you understand what an attack surface is.
Lol. I guess you learned a word from the CEH you flunked.
Edit: but yes, passkeys greatly reduce the attack surface compared to a password.
And when using a properly hardened device like a yubikey, you can actually minimize your attack surface to as low as it's ever going to be in a web context.
There is no implementation right now that enables you to own and manage your own passkey backups without Google it icloud.
Additionally, the attestation feature is one step away from banks and other sites mandating specific implementations, preventing people from using software tokens or OSS managers.
Passkeys is great, and I am eager to recommend it to everyone, but without those items addressed, it's a trap door, and one bitflip away from very strong lock in.
I just set my passkey up in Dashlane. It does not require Google or iCloud.
The same webauthn standard allows you to use a security key with PIN luck
My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected. So if you secure your phone with one of those, access to it is under 4th amendment protection. Given this, I'm curious how passkey legality would work out since it's a physical key, but access to use it would still require a knowledge element.
Passkeys will not protect you against the government.
As I said elsewhere, it's for web services. The web service provider will have to surrender your data on a court order. They can decouple it from the passkey. The passkey doesn't encrypt your data at the provider, it's only used for authentication.
If you really want to protect your data, you will need to use a different encryption solution. Something like full disk encryption with a complex pass phrase.
Google is a lot of things for a lot of reasons. This isn’t one of them. There’s plenty of reasons to bash them without needing to pull shit out of one’s ass