> Every device is supposed to have its own unique private key, stored in TPM, released only when passing the user challenge (biometrics or pin, or a yubikey).

1) When I buy a new device, how do I create 2000 new Passkeys for that device?

2) Can I still do that if I don't have access to the old device? Maybe it was destroyed, stolen, or lost.

3) How about if the new device is from a different vendor than the original device? E.g. switching from Apple to Android?

At the end, passkeys are built not for the tin-foil, (I hate Google Apple fellows), I want to keep every single locally, RMS fans. No.

A majority will benefit. End of matter.

A majority don't change platforms (I have not seen them do it).

And lets be honest - even if they were portable are you privacy person that is going to do it? No.

People break their phones. That is normal experience. Entirely unsupported by passkeys as they are today.

I'm actually surprised we didn't have more pushback for ubiquitous 2FA, as they have similar threat profile - i.e. addressing the tin-foil threats of cybersecurity aficionados, while entirely ignoring the common threats to real people, in particular the one of broken or lost mobile device.

People break their phones less often compared to telling them keep their keepassdatabase in sync across devices.

Even recently my friend fixed his iPhone XR (10 year old) 3rd party. Everything including passkeys work fine.

All these doom mongering of suspension happens so rarely that majority don't care.

There are countless reason to DIY. Agree. But passkeys will help the majority.

Also note that the kind of people - like journalists etc - that need to use DIY/local are the ones that are likely to use passkey. Reality.

These privacy zealots fail to realise that majority of population does not have time to setup bitwarden server or lineageos or zfs storage etc.

The biggest point of confusion in my opinion comes from Windows especially having lacked a way (and kind of still does) to save the private key of a passkey to your password manager, defaulting to saving it to Windows Hello, which saves the private key to your PC's TPM. In this scenario you can no longer easily copy the private key to other devices, and if you lose that Windows PC, you also lose the private key and the whole passkey as a result.

On registration, a keypair is generated, then the private key is encrypted with the long-term key burned into your security key fob or hardware. The encrypted blob is sent to the server and stored there.

On authentication, after you enter your login, the server sends the encrypted blob and your security key tries to decrypt it with the long-term key it has. If it succeeds, it then request a challenge from the servers, signs it along with the server name and timestamp and sends back to the server. Server validates the signature and if it’s good, log you in.

Expanded: As long you as the user has the security key fob, you can login. You should have 2.

Yes, you do.

Whenever a website offers to create a passkey, it could end up in any of these:

- Samsung's Password Manager (if using a Samsung phone)

- Apple's Keychain (if using an iPhone)

- Google Password Manager

- Your operating system's keychain

- A bespoke password manager (e.g., Bitwarden or LastPass)

- Your hardware key

Most users do not have a security key fob. Instead, the proposal being mostly pushed is the idea that users can store keys on their own smartphones, making use of the modern TPM and chip security. Most of the discussion here revolves around that idea: "What if I lose my phone? What if I switch phones?" and that's why the problems seem so obvious to you.

I absolutely agree the best solution is to use hardware keys, but I'll admit it's cumbersome if I need them for hundreds of accounts (which I do have), having to register both for every website and praying that I never lose both at the same time in the case there's no viable recovery flow for some of the accounts. Also, most of these hardware keys are limited to 25 or 100 resident keys, which again makes them unable to substitute passwords. Observe the usage of the term resident keys: passkeys do rely on the private key being stored on the hardware key, as that allows discovery.

In non-resident keys scenario you don’t store anything and from what I see there is no security downside of using non-resident keys.

Loosing both (or multiple) security keys is like loosing all your car or home keys. Very inconvenient, agreed.

Anyway, I think we can agree that FIDO authentication protocol implementation is a mess. Apple and Google made it messy because they wanted to lock down users to their platforms and then password managers followed. As a result, the current implementation is not more secure than “login with Apple” or “login with Google”.

Indeed, the only advantage to Resident Keys (i.e., Passkeys) is the discoverabillity of them, so you can login without even using a username. It's a shame all of the terminology around WebAuthn/FIDO2 and Passkeys is so loose and badly defined.

Honestly, I think OAuth logins are still an ok option for the average user, unfortunately, as I would never recommend someone I love to use Passkeys and put them through the burden of having to understand and deal with all of this mess.

Then, Chrome got an update and started hijacking the enrolment process from the operating system and created keys synced to Google Account. This resulted worse UX because authentication now required pulling the Android phone (for those unlucky ones who have it) and confirming the login there instead of doing it right on the computer, uninterrupted.

Then, Apple followed with cloud-only key pairs and then so did the password managers (including Bitwarden Enterprise we were using) and everything become a mess.

The only solution would be to use the key attestation and to only allow specific security keys. Both Chrome and Apple have config knobs to simplify enterprise attestation (a strong assurance, which FIDO authenticator has been used), but neither Windows nor macOS support key attestation for hardware-backed keys (and macOS ignores “platform” claim altogether).

It sucks.

Remember that your average user has no idea what a passkey is, doesn't remember half of their passwords and has no idea what a password manager is.

I actually do have a Google account, but do not link my (Android) phone to it. I don't have WhatsApp or any other spyware on the device. I do use Telegram, Ankidroid, and a few other apps that I trust. I'm not a fanatic, but I won't enable and abet anybody to follow me around and report all that I do. How my position is considered an extreme position today eludes me, and frightens me as well.

But this went out of the window when some genius decided that usernames were too complicated, so Passkeys had to be discoverable, which means they have to be fully stored token-side. Which of course has the nice side benefit of essentially killing hardware tokens and forcing people into using their Android/iOS/Windows device for it.

This part of your comment is incorrect. Discoverable Webauthn absolutely can be used with hardware tokens like Yubikeys.

Lets assume I put all the effort to explain.

I will give you a better example.

- Lets say you have a google account with pixel phone

- You are using it and added 1000 passkeys

- All are synced to your Google account

- Destroy and Get a new phone. Login to your google account with recovery code.

- All your passkeys are in your phone again.

There are plans in fidoalliance.org to make it portable. Pretty sure you are still not going to move to it.

Yes, you don't use Gmail so it does not matter. You may be don't know. And often even average Joe some how has a oldphone or iPad that has oldgmail account there or logged into wife's phone or phone based SMS whatever.

it is ok to hate passkeys or google or love only self-hosted but let others do what they want.

I have been user of solokeys (since the first one) - only opensource hardware keys. works for me...

But if you go to the local highstreet then there are tons of people doing this screenrepair etc just to recover the account. Average Joe doesnot mind paying for that. Even will give the repair guy full password to transfer all data from old to new phone.

2) See #1

3) See #1

KeepassXC supports passkeys. They suggest a couple mobile apps that also do.

If you watch the original Apple WWDC talk presenting passkeys, you will find that they were always intended to sync, at least for the consumer use-case.

What you are describing is how the WebAuthn standard had been implemented by Yubico and Google up until the point of the introduction of “passkeys” by Apple.

The reason passkeys have their own name and definition is because they are meant to be a phishing-resistant primary factor that competes with the UX of passwords. And a great usability trait of passwords is that they’re convenient to use across all your devices. With a technology involving public/private keypairs, the only possible way to compete with that UX is to sync the private key across the user’s devices.

This is my issue with passkeys. Either we lessen security to improve UX (syncing across devices implies extracting private keys from secure enclaves, at which point it’s no different to password syncing), or we have a proliferation of different keys per website across devices (assuming the website supports multiple passkeys).

Perhaps this trade off is not resolvable in a way that happily satisfies both the security constraint and the UX requirement.

Stranding private keys in clone resistant secure enclaves has unacceptably bad UX for the average user, which is why very few implementations try to do that.

Let's say eBay asks user to login. With passkey. Press and hold fingerprint etc. login done. Even with laptop.

And average Joe doesn't want to maintain a keepassdatabse sync it. Yes, you can always use your own server etc but others have life.

That is the reason: for the average Joe not having exportable passkeys is good.

Average Joe doesn't have to do backup. It is all automatic.

The main point is the average Joe it works seamless. And average Joe won't have to remember things.

Yes, it does. Not everyone wants to maintain password database.

Password managers make it easier to avoid those pitfalls, but passkeys make it nearly impossible to fall into them.

You still get the phishing resistance, though!

Yes, that is a feature and a normal use case that has equivalents in meat space, that security aficionados refuse to recognize even exists, much less support.

Another way would be auto-enrolling passkeys from other devices you own through a standard API. Enroll your trusted Apple device in your Google Account's settings, or your Bitwarden/KeePass, and vice-versa. When your iPhone creates a passkey at a site, iCloud notifies Google, which issues a new passkey and sends the public key to iCloud, which auto-enrolls it at the site alongside the iCloud passkey. BitWarden gets the same treatment. When you open your KeePass vault it checks Google and iCloud and picks up any pending offers for passkey enrollment and completes them.

Simple, secure, opt-in, and users control their devices and passkey vaults with minimal hassle. If a device is lost, the other services can help you automatically delete the compromised passkeys and set up your new replacement device.

Matter does something very similar with cross-compatibility between Apple and Google (and the rest of the ecosystem) when new devices get enrolled with the user's choice of PAA; the only thing missing is roughly cross-PAA enrollment but that would be just one additional trivial trust relationship in both ecosystems.

The high level UX of this idea feels very compelling to me as a "yes and" -- aka a world where vendors continue to offer end-to-end encrypted syncing within an ecosystem, but then this idea gets layered on to solve the cross-ecosystem problem. I think the trickiest part would be how to do it in a privacy-preserving way, but that's solvable.

So your account is now tied to a physical device; great, but the device is dead, or you own a dozen devices, now what? Each vendor has their own idea about what THIS means. Heck I have a couple that allow, max, a single Passkey at a time.

No argument from me there, just stating what the design actually calls for.

It was never meant to be consumer friendly in the first place, it's an enterprise standard. It was just shoehorned onto consumers with the synced credential compromise to make it easier, instead of coming up with something better, and then just calling it a "Passkey" which now has dual meaning.

But the real solve is difficult. If a system requires a consumer user to manage, remember, or safely store something extra, it will fail.

1. PayPal was looking for a physical authentication solution for their users, Michael Barrett was their CISO at that point and he became the president of FIDO.

2. Google developed Gnubby (which was internal, and therefore enterprise) and they wanted to push a similar authentication to their end-users, supported directly on Chrome. They wanted this to become a standards, so donated the underpinnings of the Gnubby technology which became FIDO U2F.

I might be wrong but at least these are the two parts I know.

And while the original FIDO could be called dual-use, Webauthn and especially Passkeys were developed to be first and foremost a customer-facing standard.

It doesn't mean they are not confusing, but they are clearly designed with end users in mind.

No end user wants to export and store a keychain. So they hand that off to somewhere else.

This is a misconception. A particular service can choose to enforce those class of passkeys, but most don't need that and shouldn't.

Passkeys are primarily meant to replace passwords and be hard (but not necessarily impossible) to exfiltrate.

The key difference is during normal usage you don't have to type the secret in anywhere, it's strictly asymmetric, so a unwitting user is far less likely to get fooled into accidentally leaking the actual credential.

Passkeys came together with multi-device syncing when Apple introduced them and IIRC it was pushed as their killer feature by Apple back then, but passkeys can also be completely device-bound. The marketing around this was all quite confusing, but it's a bit too late to fix now.

What we got, as far as the average consumer should be concerned, is that "passkey" is any authentication mechanism (not the actual credential) that can replace a password. And it's still confusing.

Unfortunately, the designers of passkeys decided they should replace passwords and usernames and second factors.

Also they decided they should be cloud-synchronised, so the something-you-have second factor doesn't impose the burdensome requirement for you to have something, which was apparently a big usability problem.

They obviate the need for a user identifier as the key is itself unique, but removing the 2nd factor is a choice of the service, not the designers of the Webauthn standard.

> Also they decided they should be cloud-synchronised

The earlier versions of the spec required that the keys be resident in hardware, but it was updated to allow "roaming" keys. The important part is it's up to the service to decide on whether they want to require hardware resident keys (which cannot be synced via the cloud). Most do not.

The usability problems are actually larger than that, see sibling comments for why. Passkeys, even when cloud synced, are still better than cloud synced passwords and still give the option of hardware backed keys for those whose threat model warrants it.

From what I know, Apple ignores `platform` and `ResidentKeyRequirement` claims and always creates cloud-synced key pairs.

Moreover, the strongest claim value allowed for the `ResidentKeyRequirement` is “discouraged”, which per spec is treated as SHOULD in RFC 2119 since. In other words, browsers are free to ignore it when “they know better”, which Apple always does.

If the passkey is not accepted by the service, it can use the signaling API to indicate that the passkey was not registered validly.

It is too bad they ignore that though. That's really disappointing.

And that's exactly why the technology should be rejected while we can. It's no business of a particular service how I use my devices.

If your system requires any basic intelligence or interest scrap it and go back to the drawing board because you just lost your customers.

But the original FIDO2 standard wasn't made with consumers in mind in the first place, it was driven by enterprises that wanted high-assurance security. It works in that environment because, well, a big IT department controls it, can support the employees, and you can mandate and control its use.

It was just sort of haphazardly shoehorned onto general users/consumers, prematurely IMO, via synced credentials as a compromise instead of coming up with something better.

Having spare Yubikeys is more of a hassle than both of those (and more expensive!), and the worst case scenario of losing them all is much more catastrophic. If I have no house key, I still get into my house. If I have no car key, I still get into my car (after a fair bit of hassle). If I have no Yubikey, I have permanently lost access to the accounts it was tied to.

If physical hardware tokens were as cheap as house keys and not much more difficult to set up and copy, then it would be kind of reasonable. As it is, it's unworkable. Even password managers manage to make this work. You can throw your database on every storage device you have and write the master password down on paper, and the chances of you not being able to have access to it are pretty darn close to zero.

We are talking about the rest the people that want convenience.

In a way that is the reason passkeys synced with Google or Apple just work. No need of hardware keys.

1. All passwords stored in password manager. 2. Login with password manager when logging in for the first time on a device. 3. Combination of OS and site/app notice that no passkey has been created for this account and offers to create one. This is presented to the user as “setting up the current device for password-less log ins.” 4. OS negotiates with site/app to install the passkey and use it for future log ins on the device.

It’s presented to the user as a convenience clearly tied to this device.

…but you still have your text password stored in the password manager’s servers…

Your master password to your cloud PW manager's vault is also phishable (hence why passkeys were ideally device specific, non-exportable).

Its phishing resistant not phishing proof

Not true. The original concept was always for them to be cloud synced.

This has nothing to do with their anti-phishing capabilities. The anti-phishing capabilities come from the fact that the password manager authenticates the application before handing out the passkey. It doesn’t matter if they are synced across devices or not.

You are correct that other login methods might be weaker than passkeys. I’m not sure how that’s related to passkeys though. In real security sensitive applications the recovery process is “go to the bank’s branch and show them your driver’s license”.

> Your master password to your cloud PW manager's vault is also phishable

No, it’s not. You would need to steal my yubikey to get access.

It was not. The original U2F spec was created before that idea was around and it talked about hardware security keys as means to store the primary key pair.

> Your master password to your cloud PW manager's vault is also phishable

... which is why all sensible cloud vaults have a separate enrollment key, requiring an explicit action to grant a new device access.

Arguably, that's the only way forward. SSI is also nice because you get to fully control what you share and don't share (e.g., age verification, you get to only share "I am over 21" and no other information).

Passkeys were (are?) supposed to be just a password replacement though. That services are using them to replace a username AND a password AND 2FA is a problem that's turning the device into your identity, instead of keeping the identity as three parts (What you know, what you have, who you are (biometrics)). Now we've just turned the "something you have" into the entire identity stack.

As a consumer, I don't give a shit. I use my driver's license to apply to jobs, my passport to fly, and a password (with 2FA depending on how much I / my employer cares) for everything else. I prefer whatever I use for 2FA to not be device-bound, because that's obnoxious, error-prone and constraining.

As a consumer, I don't see any reason for my auth to be more complicated than that.

Yes? I mean, that's what literally is there by default in every country. They're not either/or either, they're part of a chain.

Most importantly, none of that is device-bound. Or even person-bound. Which allows for delegation, which is a feature that cybersecurity people keep insisting is not real.

Until we find a way to securely implant a Yubikey in people's brains, it isn't going to happen.

If you’re not storing the actual private key in the Secure Enclave but only the “access to it” what’s changed from how Apple’s keychain already manages password syncing to iCloud?

The only benefit (and it’s still a decent one) is that some random website breach can’t disclose your private key.

In the US, only about 34 to 36% of adults use a password manager. Of the ~64% that don't, an alarming 20% reuse the same password across almost every service, and a ton just rely on browser autofill.

If you use a password manager, you are in the minority. Hell, even if you don't use a PW manager and you at least use a different password for different services, you are ahead of most people.

The general population is largely computer illiterate, and have a staggering lack of basic security hygiene.

It moves to the account recovery flows, but that can be much more difficult to phish.

UX usability is far better. With password and 2FA you have at least 2 steps. Here

Open the app: device like phone or laptop just asks your fingerprint or facial and done.

That is a great benefit for average Joe. Some one trying to scam remotely cannot access the account. The 89 year old grandma will say - I just give fingerprint. Done.

Yes, it won't cover all situations. Like if there is sim swap or bank employee does fraud.

Device bound is horribly broken idea. Credentials must be me-bound, so I and only me fully own and control the credential. I want to access the site from wherever I want to access it.

People lose their device all the time, there's tons of horror story where people got locked out because they lost their sole method of 2FA and if there is a method to bypass that then it is inherently insecure

For the layman yeah it is probably enough

Which in and of itself should already be a super obvious total no-go. Every device will eventually go out of service or will be decommissioned, for a multitude of reasons. Then what, I lose all access, because I went from an iPhone to Android? WTF?