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Re:FIDO Alliance publishes new spec to let users move Passke... by lxgr on Thursday October 17, 2024 @05:27AM (#41867854)
I know how they technically work.

I was referring to how 99% of people have (or can easily get) an SSN, license etc., but for 1% it’s absolutely impossible for various reasons, so any flow requiring one for non social security or tax declaration purposes is an unnecessary obstruction to them when other alternatives exist.

Don’t ever believe that passkeys will always stay strictly optional. As soon as something works for 99% of potential customers, the 1% can be deprecated for efficiency/security/… purposes.

And I’m even not anti-passkey or anything, I personally like them and will take them over SMS OTPs any day. But they’re just not done yet, and I really hope they get done in a way that works for everyone before they start becoming mandatory in some places.

Re:FIDO Alliance publishes new spec to let users move Passke... by 9dev on Thursday October 17, 2024 @05:55AM (#41868012)
I dunno. Should we then proceed to keep up the awful situation we currently have for the 99%, just to avoid any inconvenience to the 1%? That's not how democratic societies usually work.

What reasons are there for not using Passkeys? So far, the only things in the threads here were vague fears of vendor lock-in by people who apparently overlooked the fact that Passkeys are supported by a lot of password managers other than just iCloud Keychain and Google, including open source software.

What is this 1% that we should sacrifice a clear solution to password breaches for?

Re:FIDO Alliance publishes new spec to let users move Passke... by lxgr on Thursday October 17, 2024 @06:56AM (#41868349)
As I said: Most likely the ideal solution really is passkeys, just not in their current form.

I just wish their governance was a bit more aligned with users rather than just big tech. This would be something where Mozilla could really shine, for example, but I haven’t really seen them in the relevant forums, and they were quite late on WebAuthN as a whole.

Some focus on avoiding lock-in and (somewhat orthogonal to that) enabling non-cloud credential duplication would be great, to name a few remaining issues.