Feels like there are some more thematic underpinnings as well like security at the cost of user freedom or at the cost of tinker-ability.

But. The silent looming threat I predict that few others seem to see, is that Valve will guaranteed enable TPM w/ secure boot attestation in a future Steam Deck hardware update after everyone bails from Windows 10 to Valve Linux, giving it true standing as a console and overcoming today’s multiplayer lockouts by AAA games (unattested Linux is a godsend for software cheaters compared to Windows), while having captured that market on the pretense of tinkerability with full intentions to betray that unstated assumption in favor of regaining AAA multiplayer support in games.

Similarly, that’s why so many AMD gaming processors already ship with Microsoft’s secure attestation Proton chip from the Xbox inside: if Microsoft wants to end kernel-rootkit anticheat, they have to offer another solution, or else competitive PC multiplayer online gaming dies when Microsoft slams the door on Crowdstrike. Secure attestation, coming to a Steam instance near you. (And not to single out Valve — Epic will go there too!)

Console-grade attestation is coming to computers everywhere, because just as with password theft, it uniformly prevents virtually all software-based cheating. It won’t stop hardware-based cheating, but doi:10.1109/SERE-C.2012.43 and Apple mFI already demonstrated that peripheral attestation can arrive at any time — there just isn’t any point in doing so for Win/Lin gaming when most users aren’t using attestation. Yet.

Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little trying to convey the threat to repurposeability here, but, like, this is what’s coming, because after the Crowdstrike worldwide outage, kernel rootkits are on the way out - and the side effects are going to be devastating. This is why I don’t just say, as one comment below does, “fuck you” to attestation: that approach has no effect and it’s coming for everyone unless more people than I start confronting it and understanding it.

So we don't use passkeys? OK, fine, in 2025 that's possible. But for how long? How many sites and services are going to start requiring this? Will they care if a few HN readers are blocked out?

The only way to prevent this nightmare is to convince tech illiterate people to also avoid passkeys, but good luck! This kind of convenience is too attractive and the downsides are too hard to communicate to them.

The standards body did a really excellent job solving the problem. Is outrage deserved? Is this better or worse than our freedom? I would watch that debate if someone posted a video of a panel discussing the contradictions! Because I’m not sure where I stand, either.

But I just cannot stand the obliviousness that everyone has over attestation. It’s not a done deal yet. I just haven’t seen tech suggest anything to do about it, and that continues to worry.

In the absolute best-case scenario, the user gets to choose which third party to trust and could even switch to a different one later - but the general dependence on a third party will always stay.

It's DRM for passwords.

Is killing off password theft worth the tradeoff of restricting the legitimate user’s rights, or is this a step too far towards authoritarian overreach, no matter how significant the harm done to humanity by password theft?

Societal-level ethics are incredibly interesting to me, so I’m glad that the broader tech community is catching on to the ethical dilemma and engaging with it. PassKeys are a ‘good first bug’ for evaluating large-scale ethical tradeoffs of technology: the benefit and tradeoff are clear and obvious to everyone once explained, unlike so many other ethical dilemmas in tech.

1: Replace passwords with classic public key auth. The benefits of that are uncontroversial and the tech has been successfully in use for decades (e.g. with SSH keys).

2: Lock away the private key in a HSM and introduce some complicated set of rules and protocols to ensure that no one, not even the user, ever gets to see it.

Seems to me, most of the security benefit comes from the first part (no confidential data is sent, no password guessing, etc) while most of the problems come with the second part.

So why not unbundle the two parts and add public-key crypto to the web that allows the user to store their private key themselves?

Again, this is how it's done for SSH for decades, and so far I haven't heard of any large-scale SSH phishing campaigns, even though there would be enough attractive targets.

The one benefit that's advertised everywhere is "bullet proof phishing protection", because each key is tied to a domain and the HSM can refuse to sign anything with the key that's not from this domain.

But you could implement an 80% version of that with accessible private keys as well: Just add the domain (or a hash of the domain's TLS cert) to the key's metadata and have the browser refuse to use the key if it doesn't match. A user could spend some effort and change the metadata, but the bar is MUCH higher than just typing in your password somewhere.

A phisher could also try and make the user run some tool that automatically switches the metadata (or just sends off the key directly). But at that point, the phisher would be forced to trip some classic red flags like getting the user to download a tool. Also, if the user did install the tool, they'd have a huge problem even with HSM keys: The tool couldn't access the keys directly, but it could impersonate the user and use the keys.

So I don't see why we have to go from plain passwords to "opaque walled garden" with no step in between.

The only way to close the social engineering attack vector is to design a system where users cannot upload a key even if they’re conned, which is why passkeys implement both #1 (to stop transmitting the secret) and #2 (to deny all human beings the footgun). And the only way that we know of in tech today, to technically deny humans their footgun when they have physical access to the device, is to build the OS around an HSM with secure boot and attestation so that the user can’t naively or expertly bypass the footgun safety by installing software.

So, today, we have to choose as an industry between denying users the right to extract private keys from the HSM, and allowing attackers to exploit users to extract private keys from the HSM. There is no known middle ground. Should we prioritize liberty over safety, or safety over liberty? That is the core contention of Passkeys, and ultimately of attestation.

Yeah, I know that Passkeys takes that view. I'm questioning that view.

We have precedent in form of SSH, PGP, S/MIME, TLS client certificates (or actually even just regular TLS certificates) and all kinds of crypto wallets. Have there been any actual studies how many private keys in those systems were sucessfully exfiltrated through phishing?

Because this justification sounds an awful lot like an excuse for lock-in and control creep - like the mandatory auto-updates that were also promoted in the name of security and now are frequently used to push through anti-features that go against the interests of the users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791058 is the most recent post (yesterday) I can find, suggesting 200,000 impacted in a single malware instance. On average there are hundreds to thousands a year, but I don’t know their theft volume.

How many need to be impacted before the interests of user security should be given precedence over the interests of user liberties? Is there a hard line amount or is it fuzzy? Is it in the thousands, millions, or billions?

You’re definitely asking an excellent line of questioning, in my view. IS all of this Passkeys crap worth it? Will it make a significant and meaningful difference? That has to be a set of questions that the W3C has presumably studied, and if you’re lacking for sources to begin research, I would check their drafts and discussions first.

I’m not the right person to look for studies pro/con to your viewpoint, though: this topic, as with most social morality topics, is essentially academic to me — which is one of the great joys of being asocial, as I love that academia, but also means that I can’t construct a working theory of mind to support someone else’s viewpoint, pro or con, without it being uncanny valley broken and weird. I see a lot of people upset about this topic and it’s transparent enough for me to lay it out plainly, and I care about people en masse and I want to see these discussions progress beyond “this sucks” reflexive disregard and towards - for examples - “is there any better way technically”, “what led to the sacrifice of liberty deemed acceptable”, and “is it appropriate to be so cynical about human beings when they’re their own biggest enemy”.

If your government can order your password manager to lock you out of your passwords with no more trouble than locking you out of your bank account, then that lowers the cost of tyranny down to what the Chinese Communist Party enjoys.

https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-...