I think this is the biggest reason why these category of discussion happens in the first place, there is a gap between what technology is good for, whats its ideal for and then the products motivation to push it on to the user assuming it would give a good name to the company.
Passkeys are one of the few protocols that supports against phishing (Accidentally giving away your credential to some rough site) so it has its benefits and more so for enterprise users.
It becomes challenging and is ill suited when its pushed to general public. A middle ground could have been to give it as an option to user instead of forcing it on the user. For some reason its not cool enough.
From a company's perspective
- Authentication is a friction and the discoverable credential (where you just click on username button and log in) reduces the friction for user, making it easier for user to make that purchase decision
- Account take over attempts (ATOs) do take a dip, saves quite a lot of resources on customer support side for the company
IMO it’s well-suited to the general public!
What is the average person’s threat model? Re-using passwords.
What is their most common annoyance? They forget their passwords.
Built-in password managers are great for this. But they’re not universal (e.g. I believe using Apple Passwords on Mac doesn’t carry over to Android.)
Passkeys are amazing. They’re basically magic to the average person. No typing passwords; no remembering; simply vibing, securely.
I don’t think people are regularly logging in to a huge number of accounts on other devices. Maybe they are! I doubt it.
> What is the average person’s threat model? Re-using passwords.
Wrong.
As article points out, it's not having access to their account.
Followed by not being able to easily delegate access to their account to a trusted third party (like a spouse, a friend).
Password reuse addresses the first problem, however imperfectly. Ability to share password over any channel, including analog, addresses the second.
Passkeys defeat both.
Account recovery works the same with passkeys as with passwords. You click “I forgot/lost my passkey” and get a link sent you via email that lets you create a new one.
Passkeys can also be shared with other people like spouses or friends, just like passwords.
> Passkeys can also be shared with other people like spouses or friends, just like passwords.
How? They're literally designed to not be, because they're trying to prevent phishing, and you cannot in general case distinguish phishing from legitimate delegation of authority.
> Account recovery works the same with passkeys as with passwords … get a link sent you via email
Making the email account, an often attacked resource that is always online, a single point of failure. I don't mind relatively unimportant accounts being that weak, for instance where the only reason to have an account at all is to separate your preferences from someone else's, and you don't actually care about security, but for accounts where there is significant PII or payment details or other sensitive information it is a terrible idea.
A second problem with this is that for many their email account is the same as their account where their passkeys are backed up. What if you have lost your passkey due to Google locking you out for no readily apparent reason and you don't have the online influence needed to get them to take you seriously (instead being trapped in the support bot loop)?
I still run my own mail server, and if I didn't my important mail accounts wouldn't be with someone like Google (I do have a gmail address, but that account is only really used for testing other accounts when needed), so that isn't a problem for me, but most people can't be bothered with that faf¹ so usually end up with one of the big providers.
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[1] It isn't actually that much faf², until those occasions when it is³, but more faf than most people care for, especially those that don't enjoy tinkering with technical matters.
[2] Just quietly ticking over as long as I remember to regularly verify it is patched up-to-date, and keep an eye out for zero-day issues concerning the parts involved
[3] When there is a deliverability problem, where I host it has problems so I need to make sure the backup is synced and then switch over to it, when there is a relevant zero-day and I have to rush a patch in (or take other remedial action until a fix is available) then investigate to make sure I wasn't quietly affected, etc.
> Account recovery works the same with ...
Huh, that is a really funny way to spell "the primary login method used by every not-tech-savvy person I have ever met before".
This would explain why so many places have been starting to force me to log in with an email instead of a password.
Oh right, I started to notice it too - couple non-tech people around me seem to treat "password reset" as default login flow, and definitely don't complain as much about auth flows as the rest.
I guess that's one effective way to cope with security industry bullshit.
>You click “I forgot/lost my passkey” and get a link sent you via email that lets you create a new one
I don't trust my email provider.
Woah. Why not get a better email provider?
And now you have to log into your email with a Passkey that probably you lost at the same time you lost your Passkey to the original site (e.g. lost or stolen device).
If you are not using Passkeys for your email (and the site supports that type of account recovery), then you still have only the security of passwords, just with additional steps.
Well, it puts people in a bind. The current status quo of TOTP 2FA with recovery codes is bad, but it's probably the best we have - because applying passkeys to your primary e-mail is beyond stupid at this point, it's putting your digital life in mortal peril.
I guess it really depends on how one choses to define general public, probably an assumption has been made that everyone has their own personal device.
> Built-in password managers are great for this. But they’re not universal (e.g. I believe using Apple Passwords on Mac doesn’t carry over to Android.
1.Only security keys (single device credentials) are what you can use across the device not the regular platform based one
2.Browser based password managers do provide you with that interoperability across the platforms and in fact the password manager as an supported passkey authenticator allows you do the same
> Passkeys are amazing. They’re basically magic to the average person.
Passkeys are crap. They are just random password prompts to give a false sense of security.