I swear, people who idolize passkey security must never travel anywhere.
PS: "just have more devices with passkeys", they invariably say.
Yeah right because people are made of money, everyone has the forethought, and a 2nd laptop in the US is a great asset when you're in Poland and can't login anywhere.
I've been avoiding passkeys but more and more websites are trying to push them, and one website I use now requires them. I've already got a password manager! I don't need to change everything again!
The good thing about this is they thereby also support FIDO2 hard tokens such as Yubikey. The UI is often confusing but you can always tell it to provision the key to your Yubikey rather than the OS enclave.
That doesn't help if my machine (with only a few USB ports) gets stolen/lost with the token in it. It doesn't help if some of my devices only have USB-C and some only have USB-A. It's absolutely more annoying than letting my password manager fill things in or typing in a 6 digit code from my authenticator app.
Passkeys are password replacements that can't be breached/leaked/etc... I don't think they are necessarily supposed to replace 2-factor, however it's probably more secure than some of the weaker forms of 2-factor auth.
Given that in order to access your password manager's vault often requires 2-factor (or should at least) it's a level of security that I am comfortable with.
I take it a step further and host the password manager vault within my home network. My home network does not expose anything publicly except a WireGuard port, it's completely locked down. I have to VPN in to access the vault.
The subject here is literally websites trying to push passkeys on users. That is who is asking us to.
About every week now Amazon tries to trick me into creating a passkey. It doesn't even ask, it just goes ahead and triggers my browser passkey creation mechanism without my consent. PayPal recently tried to force me to create one too and I had to kill and restart the app because that was the only way to skip it. I'll stick to my password with 2FA, thanks.
It's wildly obnoxious that browsers don't let you generally suppress these prompts.
And if you take the nuclear option and strip your browser of WebAuthn support, then you obviously can't use any passkeys, which doesn't work for me - I have two sites where I do want to use passkeys (because it's the only way to avoid SMS-based MFA on every login), but I never want to see passkey prompts for any other sites.
We have now gone from having to “redo everything” to being asked to switch to a passkey by a grand total of one website.
I’ll be honest I’ve heard a lot of griping about passkeys but I have gone out of my way to switch over to them and have had precisely zero issues over the dozens of sites that I’ve bothered to make the switch on. Login flow is simpler and doesn’t rely on a browser extension guessing at login fields or trying to figure out when passwords change.
Me giving an example of one major website (actually, I gave two) is all that is needed to disprove your claim. I could provide plenty more examples of major websites asking me to, but I don't need to. I could provide plenty of examples of people telling people to "redo everything" with passkeys, but your own comment is literally advocating the same thing...
Please don't mischaracterize the conversation that is plainly visible for all to see. Just accept that you tried to suggest that nobody is asking users to switch to passkeys, and you were wrong. It seems like your error is that you just haven't been seeing it personally, since you switched on your own before the nagging started, and so you weren't aware of it. Well, now you are.
They literally are. You can easily google articles telling people to use passkeys for all their supported accounts. I'm not going to google it for you.
Why you are trying to claim the opposite is beyond me.
>We have now gone from having to “redo everything” to being asked to switch to a passkey by a grand total of one website.
Yeah right.
When passkeys were rolled out, I was told it's OK because "passwords are always going to be required to be an available alternative".
Now we've moved the goalposts to "it's just one website".
>Sometimes the new thing really is just better.
And sometimes your backpack is stolen when you're traveling, with your phone and laptop (happened to me in Poland), and you need to log into your accounts while having none of your devices or your phone number available.
What if I told you I was not one of the people saying that? You can’t take two different people with two different opinions and say “Look! You’ve moved the goalposts!”
If passkeys are significantly better, passwords will gradually stop existing. If passwords are, passkeys probably won’t catch on.
> And sometimes your backpack is stolen when you're traveling, with your phone and laptop (happened to me in Poland), and you need to log into your accounts while having none of your devices or your phone number available.
I personally keep a separate YubiKey that—along with a memorized password—is sufficient for me to retrieve my password manager database and unlock it. If this is a sufficiently motivating use-case for you, you too can take these kinds of steps to mitigate the risk.
But since we’re playing the “what if” game, what happens if you get early onset dementia and forget your passwords? Pray tell then what?
>I personally keep a separate YubiKey that—along with a memorized password—is sufficient for me to retrieve my password manager database and unlock it.
So, basically, having to create and maintain a backup device to keep separately from my laptop/phone in case they get stolen, make sure I don't lose it, but carry it with me everywhere like a crucifix.
That, and still having to remember and use a password, because otherwise the thieves get control of everything once they steal my device.
Sure. That's not objectively better than passwords which don't require this sort of hassle.
At the very least because it still requires a password.
>you too can take these kinds of steps to mitigate the risk.
OK. I can. I don't want to have to do these kind of steps, or any other dance to mitigate the real risks that passwords already protect me from.
Passkeys mitigate risks which I don't run into (”what if someone learns my password?”), while introducing others.
They are a convenience for people who run the system because they off-load those risks onto users.
>But since we’re playing the “what if” game
You're playing games with contrived hypotheticals.
I've had my laptop, phone, and wallet stolen on an overseas trip.
>what happens if you [...] forget your passwords?
I click the "forgot your password?" link which every website that uses passwords has.
Having a notebook in a vault with passwords also solves this problem.
I don't get a sudden onset of dementia which causes amnesia when I travel.
But I've lost my devices and had them stolen from me overseas.
It was a big enough hassle even though I did have the passwords.
If a website only supports one passkey on one device, it's a shitty implementation. To be fair many websites have shitty implementations, so I ended up using my yubikeys to store the secret for OTP codes.
Having only one device that has authority to log into your accounts is obviously not a good security model.
Of course they are. Lots of websites are pushing it, including while using dark patterns. You need to sometimes explicitly cancel an onboarding flow to avoid Passkeys.
For people who only use passwords having an extra device can help too. Google does not necessarily permit a login with a backup code, so to me it seems ideal to grab a spare phone, log into important accounts, and store it with a trusted party/friend.
It could be very difficult to login to an account like Gmail from overseas in the event of PC+phone[+hardware key] theft. Maybe no big deal if you can port your number to a new phone right away. Or maybe the trusted friend can help (unless Google still finds the login suspicious after all, no idea there)
I travel a lot. By train, plane, and car. I also use passkeys when possible. I have multiple Yubikeys, stored in different locations. I also have a password manager, where I typically keep track of which logins aren’t yet backed up across physical tokens.
It takes a bit of effort, but it’s not impossible.
Yes, it means that in the event of catastrophic failure I might not be able to log in to some services until I get to one of the backups. I haven’t been able to imagine a scenario where that would be truly problematic.
>Yes, it means that in the event of catastrophic failure I might not be able to log in to some services until I get to one of the backups. I haven’t been able to imagine a scenario where that would be truly problematic.
No need to imagine!
Remove all passkeys from your phone and laptop, then go somewhere overseas without any of those Yubikeys.
Have fun enjoy a "not truly problematic" scenario of getting your Yibikeys from "multiple locations" you don't have access to, while being cut off from your messengers, email, bank account, etc.
Bonus points for having your card locked or stolen at the same time.
Or, imagine the backpack with your passkeys devices being stolen on an overseas trip.
I don't have any passkeys on my phone or laptop. They're all on the Yubikeys.
I don't really see a difference with (some) password managers, though. If you use one of the keepasses, and you lose access to the file, you're in the same situation right?
And yeah, you're right, there is a risk of inconvenience. I'm not debating that. I just choose to organise my life in such a way that it is just an inconvenience.
It's literally at https://github.com/Joker-vD/keepassdb/raw/refs/heads/master/... in my case, plus a couple of other free hosting sites that support easy updates/reuploads, so losing access to it requires losing access to Internet — in which case you don't really need any (alright, most) of your passwords because you need Internet to connect to the services that require those passwords.
OK, fair, I never left my keepass file exposed like that when I used keepass.
If I remember correctly, 1Password still requires a "vault key" in addition to your username and password, and it was definitely too long and not used often enough for me to remember.
Or your backpack gets stolen.
Oops.
I swear, people who idolize passkey security must never travel anywhere.
PS: "just have more devices with passkeys", they invariably say.
Yeah right because people are made of money, everyone has the forethought, and a 2nd laptop in the US is a great asset when you're in Poland and can't login anywhere.