They really aren’t a trap. They’re a well designed standard. The tooling around them isn’t quite perfect yet, but they’re a huge improvement over passwords.
People upvote because big tech has a tendency of forcing the most anti ownership outcome possible on everyone. Here, such an outcome likely would be mandatory passkeys that are set up to require hardware attestation.
One way to reduce that risk is to boycott passkeys until TPM and hardware attestation is removed from the standard. You may not think that’s a fair response, or that such a boycott won’t save us from the inevitable outcome, but nevertheless it’s not a completely irrational reaction.
And also until the committee designing it has it members on it representing the interests of users. The point that this was lacking in the original is-a-trap article is an important one and is also being missed.
I’m just not convinced that mandatory hardware attestation is actually a real problem we need to worry about.
Like, yes, people with high security jobs will have that for sure. And they should.
But large companies that want customers? They want to make it as easy as possible for their customers to connect. They’re not going to force people to have a hardware device which if damaged or lost will lose them a customer. That’s just not what they want.
I only dislike the ability for service providers to enforce a “security level”. Those should be the exclusively under my (the user) control. Sending preferred default (hints) would be cool, but not enforcement.
That a webpage can basically prevent me from using a passkey if the passkey is stored in software (a password manager for example) is complete bullshit. Especially if there is still username/password as alternative which is clearly worse. Sure, hardware tokens are the ultimate security. But it should be up to me and not them if I want that level of security.
This has actually been a really good discussion on both sides as I think many including myself didn’t know about some of the inner workings of them. I’m glad the discussion happened. The trap article IS worth a read, it’s overly long but is really well written. After reading enough about both sides though I don’t think I’m too worried and will continue using them.
I fucking love passkeys. I hate 2FA on every god damn website, but clearly the majority of people are too lazy/stupid for passwords alone to work in a time when phishing is so widespread. My only problem with them was that I couldn’t use my Bitwarden passkeys in Firefox for Android, but they fixed that, and I’ve never had a bad experience with a passkey since.
They really aren’t a trap. They’re a well designed standard. The tooling around them isn’t quite perfect yet, but they’re a huge improvement over passwords.
People upvote because they hate change.
People upvote because big tech has a tendency of forcing the most anti ownership outcome possible on everyone. Here, such an outcome likely would be mandatory passkeys that are set up to require hardware attestation.
One way to reduce that risk is to boycott passkeys until TPM and hardware attestation is removed from the standard. You may not think that’s a fair response, or that such a boycott won’t save us from the inevitable outcome, but nevertheless it’s not a completely irrational reaction.
And also until the committee designing it has it members on it representing the interests of users. The point that this was lacking in the original is-a-trap article is an important one and is also being missed.
I’m just not convinced that mandatory hardware attestation is actually a real problem we need to worry about.
Like, yes, people with high security jobs will have that for sure. And they should.
But large companies that want customers? They want to make it as easy as possible for their customers to connect. They’re not going to force people to have a hardware device which if damaged or lost will lose them a customer. That’s just not what they want.
This is what people seem to be missing, I haven’t seen a rebuttal to this problem.
I only dislike the ability for service providers to enforce a “security level”. Those should be the exclusively under my (the user) control. Sending preferred default (hints) would be cool, but not enforcement.
That a webpage can basically prevent me from using a passkey if the passkey is stored in software (a password manager for example) is complete bullshit. Especially if there is still username/password as alternative which is clearly worse. Sure, hardware tokens are the ultimate security. But it should be up to me and not them if I want that level of security.
This has actually been a really good discussion on both sides as I think many including myself didn’t know about some of the inner workings of them. I’m glad the discussion happened. The trap article IS worth a read, it’s overly long but is really well written. After reading enough about both sides though I don’t think I’m too worried and will continue using them.
I fucking love passkeys. I hate 2FA on every god damn website, but clearly the majority of people are too lazy/stupid for passwords alone to work in a time when phishing is so widespread. My only problem with them was that I couldn’t use my Bitwarden passkeys in Firefox for Android, but they fixed that, and I’ve never had a bad experience with a passkey since.