All the major password managers store passkeys now. I have every passkey I’ve been able to make stored in Bitwarden, and they’re accessible on all my devices.
Article is behind the times, and this dude was wrong to “rip out” passkeys as an option.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
All the major password managers store passkeys now. I have every passkey I’ve been able to make stored in Bitwarden, and they’re accessible on all my devices.
Article is behind the times, and this dude was wrong to “rip out” passkeys as an option.
That's a typical DHH article, essentially. He has some interesting insights, but everything else is borderline cult-leader opinions, and some people follow it as gospel
If a password manager stores passkeys, how is that much different than just using a password manager with passwords?
I just wish that companies enabling passkeys would still allow password+MFA. There are several sites that, when you enable passkeys, lock you out of MFA for devices that lack a biometric second factor of authentication. I'd love to use passkeys + biometrics otherwise, since I've often felt that the auth problem would be best solved with asymmetric cryptography.
EDIT: I meant to say "would still allow passkeys+MFA." hooray for sleep deprivation lol.
His "just use email" like that isn't very obviously worse in every respect kind of undermines his whole premise.
It’s because he has an email company he wants you to use for $100 a year lol
His whole premise is undermined by him not doing any research on the topic before deciding to write a blog post. Proton passkeys for instance, are cross platform, and the ability to transfer passkeys between devices is one of the features being worked on by the other providers.
I am very shitty on security (I would not write this reply on a post on the cybersecurity community), and I resisted MFA for several years as being too annoying having to login to mail/SMS. After finding open source apps supporting TOTP, I feel better about it and I manually do the syncing by just transferring the secrets between my devices offline.
Passkeys are another foreign thing that I think I will get used to eventually, but for now there are too many holes in support, too much vendor lock-in (which was my main distaste for MFA, I didn't want MS or Google Authenticator), and cumbersome (when email and SMS were the only options for MFA, difficulty of portability for passkeys).
So the problems you have with them are already solved, in the exact same ways they were solved for password/MFA. If you let Apple manage everything for you, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using passwords or passkeys, you’re locked in either way. But you always have the option to manage your passkeys manually (just like you’re doing with your TOTP) or using a third party cross-platform solution that allows for passkey import and export.
I do think that we need more standard procedures around what a reset/authorize new device looks like in a passkey world. There's a lot about that process that just seems like it's up to the implementer. But I don't think that invalidates passkeys as a whole, and most people are going to have access to their mobile device for 2 factor no matter where they are.
Incidentally I have no idea who this is or whether his opinion should be lent more weight.
Passkeys aren't a full replacement in my opinion, which is what DHH gets wrong. It's a secure, user-friendly alternative to password+MFA. If the device doesn't have a passkey set up you revert to password+MFA.
Whenever I read an article about security (and read the comments, even here on Lemmy) I'm constantly frustrated and depressed by a couple of things.
Corporations making things shittier with the intention of locking customers in to their stupid proprietary ecosystem. And of course, they are always seeking more data harvesting. Security itself is way down the list of their priories, if it's even there at all.
Users being lazy trend-followers who quickly sacrifice their security on the altar of convenience and whatever shiny new FOMO thing is offered up for "better security".
It's a very bad combination. Doing security right is a bit inconvenient (which users hate) and expensive (which corporations hate).
I wish all sites using 2FA would just support hardware keys instead of authenticator apps. It's so much easier to login to a site by just plugging in my hardware key and tapping its button, than going to my authenticator app and typing over some code within a certain time.
It's even sinpler than email 2fa or sms 2fa or vendor app 2fa.
For authenticator app you also can't easily add more devices unless you share the database which is bad for security. For hardware security key you can just add the key as an additional 2fa, if the site allows it.
There was a related news recently, that bitwarden and other pw managers will be able to sync passkeys between devices. Won't that solve these issues?
My thoughts exactly. I use Bitwarden and passkeys sync flawlessly between my devices. Password managers tied to a a device or ecosystem are stupid and people shouldn’t use them. This is true whether you use passwords or passkeys.
That said, we cannot blame users for bad UX that some platforms and some devs provide.
I thought passkeys were supposed to be a hardware device?
This is typical embrace/extend/extinguish behavior from the large platforms that don't want their web-SSO hegemony challenged because it would mean less data collection and less vendor lock-in.
The whole idea of passkeys provided by an online platform should have been ruled out by the specification. It completely defeats the purpose of passkeys which is that the user has everything they need to authenticate themself.