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
You can store Passkeys in open source password managers.
I don’t know most of my passwords, so the step to passkeys doesn’t feel like a big one. I also really like the flow of pressing Login; Bitwarden pops up a prompt without me initiating it; I press confirm. Done, logged in, and arguably more secure due to the surrounding phishing and shared secrets benefits.
Sure, they probably work great when you have your *passkey manager on the device, but that’s not when I need to have backup routes into my accounts. When using a new device, or someone else’s, having even a complicated password that can be typed or copied-pasted has way more functionality.
As far a I can tell, using passkeys would only risk locking me out of my accounts. Everyone else is already effectively locked out.
You could also use dedicated hardware to store your keys. Any FIDO USB key will do. I have a Yubikey that cost me less than 30 bucks.
It’s really handy, because I frequently use someone else’s device for work. All I have to do is plug it in, press the button on the key and enter the master password for the passkey storage. It’s like having a password manager on a USB stick.
I can access my password manager via the browser from any device.
Can’t you access your password manager from a web browser? Or your phone?
Oops, meant passkey manager, fixed it.
I was never prompted to do such a thing. It always just told me to plug in my phone (and even that didn’t work).
Yeah the moods in this thread, like
“[I don’t understand this]!”
“[I don’t trust this]!”
“[It doesn’t fix everything]!”
“[This doesn’t benefit me]!”
“[What’s wrong with old way]!?”
And like, all valid feelings… just the reactions are a bit… intense? Especially considering it’s a beta stage auth option that amounts to a fancy version of the old sec key industry standard, not the mark of the beast.
Because we all know it will eventually go from a “neat” to mandatory with vendor lock-in for no other reason than “fuck you”.
We’ve all seen it a few hundred times now with X, and Y.
I get a few daily pop-ups for “Want to use a pass key”. One from my bank. No I don’t want to link my fingerprint to my bank account especially in a way that will lock me out when I replace my phone.
Remember folks: Biometrics (What you are) is not constitutionally protected but what you know is (for now at least).
If we cut and run every time a big corporation “embraces” a new standard, just to lessen the pain of the day it’s inevitably “extinguished,“ we’d miss out on quite a lot.
This standard was open from the start. It was ours. Big corps sprinted ahead with commercial development, as they do, but just because they’re first to implement doesn’t mean we throw in the towel.
Also:
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the FIDO2 standard works. It is not designed to be vendor specific and as other people in this thread point out, plenty of open-source secrets managers and hardware implement passkeys.
What we’ve seen is the typical Silicon Valley model of “embrace, extend, extinguish” so you’re right to be wary of any implementation by Google or Microsoft.
Same goes for biometrics - how you unlock the passkey isn’t specified in the standard. It is left up to the implementation. If you don’t want to use biometrics, you don’t have to.
You do not need your fingerprint or any other biometric to use a passkey.
You do not lose access to passkeys when you lose your device.