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Passkeys Explained: The End of Passwords (sentientrant.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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).

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    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:

    1. Bio auth isn’t necessary. It’s just how Google/Apple do things on their phones. It’s not part of the FIDO2 standard.
    2. It works with arbitrary password managers including FLOSS and lots of hardware options.
    3. Passkeys can sync to arbitrary devices, browsers, device bound sessions, whatever.
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