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
I’ve been resisting using them and decided to set one on my rarely-used and unimportant Piefed account to try it out.
Saved to Bitwarden fine on my desktop browser. When I try to log in with a browser on my phone, it asks for my username and does nothing more after that dialog closes. While I’m not sure if this is a problem with Piefed, Bitwarden, or Firefox, I’m now disinclined to try it with anything important, especially if that thing might then discourage me from logging in with a password.
I recognize the theoretical advantages, but passkeys don’t do much to solve problems I actually have. All my passwords look like
@A#vVukh9c$3Kw4Cs8NP9xgazEuJ3JWEand are unique. Bitwarden won’t autofill the wrong domain. I don’t enter credentials in links from emails I didn’t trigger myself immediately before. I haven’t checked whether I can reliably backup and restore them in my Bitwarden vault.I self host vaultwarden, and use bitwarden clients everywhere. Passkeys are stored there
Passkeys to me, are a better way to insert login information. Some developers don’t think of passwords getting automatically filled in, so this autofill sometimes breaks. Passkeys might be a improved interface to integrate password managers. Also, sometimes 2FA keys from my bitwarden client gets copied into the clipboard, which sometimes overwrites the stuff I wanted to preserve in there. This does not happen with passkeys.