Technology

59428 readers

3166 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

290

Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Tibert@jlai.lu to c/technology@lemmy.world

192 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won't work on another device.

Now I don't know if that key can be stolen or not, or if it's really more secure or not, as people have really unsecure pins.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] alvvayson@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think you understand what an attack surface is.

[–] alvvayson@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.