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Re:Passkeys: The Beginning of the End of the Password by awaythrow98765 on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:59PM (#35806300)
> No. Passkeys can't be phished, passwords can. Passkeys can't be cracked after a data breach. Passwords can. Passkeys can't be set to something easily guessable. Passwords can. Passkeys can't be written on a post-it note and taped to your monitor. Passwords can. Passkeys can't be reused across multiple sites. Passwords can.

Passkeys don't need to be cracked after a data breach of your backup provider, they are just usable, right there.

> There are so many ways passkeys are superior to user-memorized passwords from a security perspective, it's laughable to call them "as insecure as a password".

Passkeys are accessible permanently on some devices unencrypted or decryptable in the filesystem, if part of e.g. a backup. Whereas passwords are usually only accessible temporarily. That makes the attack surface top copy over some passkey far larger than for sniffing a password.

Re:Passkeys: The Beginning of the End of the Password by Ajedi32 on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @03:39PM (#35806713)
You seem to be under the false impression that passkey databases are stored completely unencrypted and unprotected on disk or in the cloud. Obviously those details are implementation-dependent, but I don't know of any passkey implementation that works that way.

Let's take Apple's implementation as an example (since that was the one I could most easily find information on). Their implementation stores passkeys in the iCloud keychain[1], which is end-to-end encrypted[2].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/sign-in-with-passkeys...

[2]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-keychain-syn...

Re:Passkeys: The Beginning of the End of the Password by lxgr on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @05:42PM (#35808180)
> Passkeys are accessible permanently on some devices unencrypted or decryptable in the filesystem, if part of e.g. a backup. Whereas passwords are usually only accessible temporarily.

I think you're mixing up server-side and client/sync-backend-side compromises here.

For the former (i.e. a compromise of hashed passwords and their corresponding salts), you'll need to rotate all passwords since the hashes can be brute-forced. For passkeys, all an attacker gets when compromising a service's database are public keys that can't be brute-forced and key handles that don't give an attacker anything without the corresponding authenticators.

For the latter, the situation is exactly the same for passkeys and passwords in a password manager, i.e. both are as secure as their on-device storage and encryption in transit and rest at a synchronization provider (if any).