Passkeys are built on the FIDO2 standard (CTAP2 + WebAuthn standards). They remove the shared secret, stop phishing at the source, and make credential-stuffing useless.
But adoption is still low, and interoperability between Apple, Google, and Microsoft isn’t seamless.
I broke down how passkeys work, their strengths, and what’s still missing
While the lock-in issue is annoying and a good reason not to adopt these, the device failure issue is a tech killer. Especially when I can use a password manager. This means I can remember two passwords (email and password manager), make them secure, and then always recover all my accounts.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction and I believe the only reason they are being pushed is because security people think they are cool and tech companies would be delighted to lock you into their system.
Password managers store passkeys. They’re portable and not device-locked. Been using them on Bitwarden for like 2 years now.
It is not portable in the sense that you need bitwarden installed on the device you are trying to connect from.
Passwords can be plain text, which means I can copy, paste, and dictate them to a device that does not have additional software installed.
Cops also love them because they make getting access to your entire phone including all accounts simple as cake if you use fingerprint/faceID to unlock your device.
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I use them with bitwarden and a self hosted vaultwarden. If my phone breaks, no issue. If my server breaks, I got local backups… Keys are stored encrypted in a postgres database for which I have access, if I need to restore it. No lock-in issue or risk of loosing access when one or two devices break.
That sounds great, but also isn’t a solution for most people.
True. But most good stuff isn’t a solution for everyone. It takes real effort to escape vendor-lockin. Bigtech made sure of that.
If something is too simple to set up or requires no set up, or comes from a for-profit company, but doesn’t cost anything, then it always suspicious.
I am just saying that the issue is not with passkey itself, but the individual implementations and that google/twitter/etc. is pushed towards regular users.
Critiquing passkey because vendor-lockin is like critiquing HTML for allowing ads.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction
Question is by what? I could see an argument that it is an overcomplication of some ill-defined application of x509 certificates or ssh user keys, but roughly they all are comparable fundamental technologies.
The biggest gripe to me is that they are too fussy about when they are allowed and how they are stored rather than leaving it up to the user. You want to use a passkey to a site that you manually trusted? Tough, not allowed. You want to use against an IP address, even if that IP address has a valid certificate? Tough, not allowed.
They were surpassed by password managers and 2fa.
Password managers are a workaround, and broadly speaking the general system is still weak because password managers have relatively low adoption and plenty of people are walking around with poorly managed credentials. Also doesn’t do anything to mitigate a phishing attack, should the user get fooled they will leak a password they care about.
2FA is broad, but I’m wagering you specifically mean TOTP, numbers that change based on a shared secret. Problems there are: -Transcribing the code is a pain -Password managers mitigate that, but the most commonly ‘default’ password managers (e.g. built into the browser) do nothing for them -Still susceptible to phishing, albeit on a shorter time scale
Pub/priv key based tech is the right approach, but passkey does wrap it up with some obnoxious stuff.
Not to mention Apple decided to make passkeys Airdropable. Fun.
I worked on a cool projected called FedID: https://fedid.me/ that creates a distributed identifier (DID) out in the world, federated with AvtivityPub, and gives you a key you can sign in with via OpenID Connect. It allows the DID to have multiple keys for multiple devices, and delegate authority, so losing a device/failure is no big deal.
That being said, Web passkeys can be stored in password managers, just like passwords.
Even if you are really careful, your details can always be leaked from a company server during a breach. If the companies adopt passkeys, that issue isn’t there. Because there isn’t a password anyone can randomly use. That’s why I feel big tech companies are moving towards it.
Yes, you have to trust the company storing the passwords.
A good company can store passwords in ways that are secure to most hacking attempts. It isn’t impossible to break the encryption typically used, but it is difficult enough that most thieves will not have the resources or time to make use of the data. They want the low effort password databases, not the difficult and expensive ones.
The biggest disadvantage:
Disadvantages of Passkeys
Ecosystem Lock-In – Passkey pairs are synced through each vendor’s respective clouds via end-to-end encryption to facilitate seamless access multiple devices.
More eggs in the American megacorp basket for more people, yay
Currently I use a FOSS (I think?) password manager, BitWarden, that supports passkeys. I use it across Mac, Windows and Android so I’m while my passkeys are locked yo the password manager, I am not locked to any of the aforementioned megacorps.
I use BitWarden too. OS , device and browser agnostic is a win
But I imagine the vast amount of people will use whatever their platform is pushing, so Apple Google or Microsoft. And in 5 years time “3rd party passkeys” are not “secure enough” and blocked by the OS. (Ok that’s a bit tinfoil hat, but Google’s recent Android app developer verification scheme is fresh in mind)
Your password hashes (assuming they even hash them) already live on their servers…
Why do you have the 4-digit PIN? Well, it’s just to unlock the part of your device where the private key is stored.
And there is the problem I have with passkeys. With a password it is me authenticating to the service I’m using. Pretty straight forward (if you ignore the operating system, web browser, network protocols, etc., but that’s part of using the tech).
With passkeys you’ve got this third party storing your keys that increases your attack surface. It could be your web browser, your OS, or some cloud provider that you’re now relying on to keep your data safe. I get that for people whose password is “password123” or who aren’t savvy enough to avoid phishing maybe this helps. But with decent opsec this overly complicates authentication, IMO.
To my point, later in the article:
Securing your cloud account with strong 2FA and activating biometrics is crucial.
What’s that now? The weak point is the user’s ability to implement MFA and biometrics? The same users who couldn’t be bothered to create different passwords for different sites? You see how we’ve just inserted another layer into the authentication process without solving for the major weakness?
With my tinfoil hat on I suspect this push toward passkeys is just another corporate data and/or money grab – snake oil for companies to get their tentacles tighter around your digital existence.
Happy to be proven wrong.
Passkeys can’t be phished.
That’s the main point.
Phishing is a reeeeal pain. And something that needs to be solved. Not through training but with technology.
Today we use lots of accounts with unique passwords. Obviously these passwords have to be stored somewhere. So I disagree with you when you say it’s a unique passkey thing.
Passkey has an advantage when it comes to phishing because it doesn’t totally rely on human intelligence or state of mind.
From a personal experience my data was leaked online, not because of phishing or I was careless. but it was leaked from a well known third party site which I used. They were affected by a very serious breach. Many unlike me use the same passwords for their emails and stuffs. But in case of passkeys there isn’t a shared secret. A breach will be useless.
I think you’re making my point. First, you’re right that passkeys can’t be phished. But access to the passkey manager can be. And now you’ve doubled your exposure to leaky third parties, once with the service you’re accessing and another with the passkey manager.
But the third parties actually have no access to your passkeys. The passkey stored are end to end encrypted blobs. So even if anyone gets hold of it, its useless. But a password for instance when leaked from 3rd party can be used easily as the server will have to decrypt the password at one point. So the means to decrypt the password will be at the server but passkeys aren’t like that. The private passkey can be decrypted only on your device for signing the challenge. Basically your exposure was basically halved.
No, thanks. I’ll keep using password+2FA and I hope that passkeys never become “mandatory”.
Thanks to our dystopian hellscape we live in it’ll become mandatory just like useless online ids. I hate having to explain passkeys to my family. Some fuckface suit who doesn’t use it properly pushed for a portfolio addition.
But what’s dystopian about passkeys. They are actually more secure than Password + TOTP. Phishing out a passkey is practically impossible.
If its not fully functional it feels more like a vendor lock in than anything actually useful. Use a Google device but want to change? Oh I’m sorry you have to do all this work first thanks to passkeys.
Some websites are better about it but they can also have support in-fighting over which service works better. Its the Password Manager scenario all over again but worse.
That’s why it’s important to avoid vendor lock-in and use actual reputable password managers to secure your passkeys such as Bitwarden, 1Password, or KeePass. On Android 14+ and iOS, you can even set your preferred password manager as the default passkey provider.
If you don’t fully trust Bitwarden servers, you can self-host a Vaultwarden instance, which is compatible with Bitwarden clients. Alternatively, using a yubikey is also a great hardware based option. Just because Google & Microsoft are heavily promoting passkeys doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad.
Passkeys work flawlessly for me across platforms:
- Android 14–15 (except on Brave with de-Googled devices)
- iOS 17–26 (and likely beyond)
- Windows 11
- Linux; while it doesn’t have OS-level integration yet, passkeys work perfectly in modern browsers
Personally, I use passkeys everywhere. I host my own Vaultwarden instance to store all my passkeys, and for redundancy, I also keep separate ones in my Keepass database, which I use for TOTPs. My self-hosted stack is secured by Authentik, running completely passwordless and uses passkeys for authentication and other apps integrate via OAuth and Proxy Auth.
I still don’t quite understand the issue you mentioned with websites. Typically, the passkey mechanism is triggered directly by the browser or OS (if you’re on mobile). You’ll be prompted to either save a new passkey or sign in with an existing one. If your password manager is correctly set up as the default credential provider, it should work seamlessly. Even without a browser extension, most Chromium-based browsers let you scan a QR code with another device that has your passkeys or you can simply insert a yubikey to authenticate.
What infuriates me is that some services like Amazon use passkeys only as second factor and asks for an OTP anyways which defeats the whole purpose. But for services that do it right, passkeys works seamless!
Yeah now try explaining all of that to tech illiterate family who don’t care beyond “I’ll just use Google Passkey” even if its the worst option.
I set my mother up on my Vaultwarden instance and she uses it just fine w/o needing to configure anything other than me setting it as the Default Passkey Provider.
Didn’t have to explain her anything other than telling her to scan her fingerprint when the prompt comes. 🤷🏻♂️
The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa
Personally, I found that It works well with Microsoft, Paypal, Google, Shopify and Proton. I was really surprised to find the option on German government sites, worked there as well. Tested in Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf. The only thing I find dissappointing is adoption
This
Tried Passkey in the past. I had many problems, especially could not understand why they must use my google account. Now my google account is gone, don’t gonna go that rabbit hole again, i am happy with my Bitwarden and Aegis.
You can now use thirds parties APIs for Passkey. I use ProtonPass on my part, it works great most of the time, but there are still some apps that have Google provider hard-coded.
You missed some disadvantages. For example the UX and complexity are terrible.
Nope.
if it undermines or circumvents my fifth amendment right not to testify against myself, then I’m not interested in ending the use of passwords.
I like passkeys but ONLY as the second factor. Using them as the primary makes no sense in majority of cases.
I store the passkeys in my self hosted vaultwarden, they are a good replacement for auto inserting random passwords via text boxes.
What am I dependent on to access by stuff if I use a passkey? A smart phone?
I’ve been mostly too lazy to look into how to use passkeys. If my normal flow is using 1password for 2fa (on mobile and on the computer), is there a way I can still use that with passkeys? It says they’re supported but I’m not sure how that’d work, because aren’t they device specific?
I just don’t want me losing access to my phone for whatever reason mean that I lose access to my accounts.
seems like too much messing around to make it a widespread solution.
hot take: end users will be more likely to adopt security keys (or device attested passkey which = security key). Physical security, out-of-bounds cryptography to defeat AitM attacks (fake landing pages where six digit codes are stolen and silently used in perpetuity by the bad actor)
source: my job is to try to get end users to put strong MFA on all the things.
