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Re:Understanding Passkeys by cstrahan on Friday May 19, 2023 @02:59PM (#36005606)
Per this: https://www.slashid.dev/blog/passkeys-deepdive/

The private key is both kept in your phone’s Secure Enclave and stored in iCloud, so strictly speaking the implementation isn’t hardware-bound in that case.

But I think the intended point is something more practical: can you, as a user, export the passkey to be shared on your non-Apple laptop, phone, etc? And maybe I’m mistaken, but I’ve been under the impression that you cannot.

Re:Understanding Passkeys by judge2020 on Friday May 19, 2023 @03:35PM (#36005948)
Given it sync from iCloud, you probably could export with enough prying at the MacOS Keychain app, but exporting them out is not a supported use case yet.
Re:Understanding Passkeys by vbezhenar on Friday May 19, 2023 @03:57PM (#36006168)
If macOS can download it from iCloud, with enough reverse engineering you should be able to use the same APIs.
Re:Understanding Passkeys by michaelt on Friday May 19, 2023 @04:05PM (#36006254)
Unless iCloud only lets you download it in a form only the secure enclave can decrypt.
Re:Understanding Passkeys by spear on Friday May 19, 2023 @04:29PM (#36006499)
I'm pretty sure my 2017 Macbook Pro (Intel, no Touch Bar) doesn't have a Secure Enclave chip, yet it supports Passkeys.
Re:Understanding Passkeys by snagg on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @04:09PM (#36143574)
Hi,

I'm the author of the SlashID blogpost. You are right, the WebAuthn standard doesn't provide any guarantees on the authenticator storage security hence passkeys (and WebAuthn creds) can be stored in anything that speaks CTAP2.

We wrote a follow-up blogpost talking about the threat model in which we touch on the above: https://www.slashid.dev/blog/passkeys-security-implementatio...

Re:Understanding Passkeys by snagg on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @04:07PM (#36143534)
Hi,

I'm the author of the blogpost. You are spot on, Passkeys are exportable so the private key ends up both on iCloud and the Enclave/authenticator.

My understanding is that there's chatter about cross-vendor synchronization of passkeys but nothing concrete yet.

Meanwhile Apple allows people to share Passkeys via AirDrop (Settings > Passwords - select the passkey you want and click the "Share" icon to send it over Airdrop) so it should be possible with some effort to obtain the private key with something like this: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop. Haven't done extensive testing yet though, so I can't confirm.

Would love to hear if anybody knows more about how the sharing via AirDrop is implemented/protected.