I access a website through at least four different devices (my iPad, iPhone, Windows Desktop computer, and MacBook Pro) and three different browsers on each device (Brave, Firefox, Safari) , and I use LastPass. If I accidentally set up a passkey on my phone (let’s say I use Safari one day instead of my go-to, Brave), can I still log in without that passkey on other devices? Is there a way to ensure that passkey can be used on other devices? Can I add another passkey on another device? How many passkeys can I set up for a particular site/app? I have at least 6 different combination of browser/devices in use.

I don’t want to use Passkeys because I don’t the answers to those questions, and I don’t know whether each website/app that has set up Passkeys has decided the answers to those questions in the same way as the others. For now, I’m going to stick with LastPass and use Passwords; because no matter whether I lose my device or not or whether I’m on my own devices or not, I can be sure I’ll be able to get into a site/app.

Edit: One final consideration, my spouse and I share user/name passwords for some things (notably Pandora and our Amazon Prime account) since they don’t handle things like family logins well; how do both my wife and I use amazon or Pandora with passkeys? Do we each set up passkeys? How do I get her Pass if that’s not an option?

My non-technical friends are extremely confused by passkeys and if they should use them and how to use them and I honestly don't have very good answers. It is a mess. I don't believe an inherit mess, but one created by the companies and projects trying to take advantage of the new system.

Which defeats part of the point of passkeys in the first place in that they are supposed to be device-bound, the private key held in the TPM or secure enclave or whatever other security chip, mathematically non-exportable. Storing all your private keys in a cloud vault still leaves you exposed to potential credential theft if your vault gets compromised.

Every device is supposed to have its own unique private key, stored in TPM, released only when passing the user challenge (biometrics or pin, or a yubikey).

  > Every device is supposed to have its own unique private key, stored in TPM, released only when passing the user challenge (biometrics or pin, or a yubikey).

1) When I buy a new device, how do I create 2000 new Passkeys for that device?

2) Can I still do that if I don't have access to the old device? Maybe it was destroyed, stolen, or lost.

3) How about if the new device is from a different vendor than the original device? E.g. switching from Apple to Android?

If you watch the original Apple WWDC talk presenting passkeys, you will find that they were always intended to sync, at least for the consumer use-case.

What you are describing is how the WebAuthn standard had been implemented by Yubico and Google up until the point of the introduction of “passkeys” by Apple.

The reason passkeys have their own name and definition is because they are meant to be a phishing-resistant primary factor that competes with the UX of passwords. And a great usability trait of passwords is that they’re convenient to use across all your devices. With a technology involving public/private keypairs, the only possible way to compete with that UX is to sync the private key across the user’s devices.

This is a misconception. A particular service can choose to enforce those class of passkeys, but most don't need that and shouldn't.

Passkeys are primarily meant to replace passwords and be hard (but not necessarily impossible) to exfiltrate.

The key difference is during normal usage you don't have to type the secret in anywhere, it's strictly asymmetric, so a unwitting user is far less likely to get fooled into accidentally leaking the actual credential.

Passkeys came together with multi-device syncing when Apple introduced them and IIRC it was pushed as their killer feature by Apple back then, but passkeys can also be completely device-bound. The marketing around this was all quite confusing, but it's a bit too late to fix now.

What we got, as far as the average consumer should be concerned, is that "passkey" is any authentication mechanism (not the actual credential) that can replace a password. And it's still confusing.

So your account is now tied to a physical device; great, but the device is dead, or you own a dozen devices, now what? Each vendor has their own idea about what THIS means. Heck I have a couple that allow, max, a single Passkey at a time.

No argument from me there, just stating what the design actually calls for.

It was never meant to be consumer friendly in the first place, it's an enterprise standard. It was just shoehorned onto consumers with the synced credential compromise to make it easier, instead of coming up with something better, and then just calling it a "Passkey" which now has dual meaning.

But the real solve is difficult. If a system requires a consumer user to manage, remember, or safely store something extra, it will fail.

1. PayPal was looking for a physical authentication solution for their users, Michael Barrett was their CISO at that point and he became the president of FIDO.

2. Google developed Gnubby (which was internal, and therefore enterprise) and they wanted to push a similar authentication to their end-users, supported directly on Chrome. They wanted this to become a standards, so donated the underpinnings of the Gnubby technology which became FIDO U2F.

I might be wrong but at least these are the two parts I know.

And while the original FIDO could be called dual-use, Webauthn and especially Passkeys were developed to be first and foremost a customer-facing standard.

It doesn't mean they are not confusing, but they are clearly designed with end users in mind.

If your system requires any basic intelligence or interest scrap it and go back to the drawing board because you just lost your customers.

But the original FIDO2 standard wasn't made with consumers in mind in the first place, it was driven by enterprises that wanted high-assurance security. It works in that environment because, well, a big IT department controls it, can support the employees, and you can mandate and control its use.

It was just sort of haphazardly shoehorned onto general users/consumers, prematurely IMO, via synced credentials as a compromise instead of coming up with something better.

(But you're not going to lose it, because you use a password manager, and the passkey will be stored there and synchronized to all of your other devices.)

The weird part is that password managers provide no way for you to copy and paste your passkeys. To present a passkey, you have to use a password manager. This makes it impossible to copy and paste your passkey to the wrong person (someone trying to trick you).

Major password managers don’t even allow you to export your passkeys to a file that you can read/backup yourself. Instead, the password managers each have their own finicky app-to-app mechanism for transferring passkeys from one password manager to another. (I think all the password managers kinda like that lock in.)

Finally, note that for logging into your password manager itself, you'll always require something outside your password manager to login, probably a password, but possibly a YubiKey; your choice. (It's your one "last password," as they call it.)

https://danfabulich.medium.com/passkeys-are-just-passwords-t...

P.S. It's past time to move off of LastPass. LastPass lost all of your passwords again last month, just like they did in 2022. The most similar service is 1Password. If you like LastPass, you'll like 1Password about the same, but 1Password hasn't had multiple terrible security breaches.

The issue isn't what passkeys _are_ (e.g. explaining they are like public/private "ssh keys" and hoping that type of explanation ends the confusion).

Instead, it's the workflow around passkeys. The websites show very confusing dialog popups and choices that a lot of normal people will not understand. This is a good article with screenshots showing the confusion: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/passkey-technology-...

I have senior citizens asking me about passkeys because their bank and medical websites keep reminding them about switching to passkeys every time they login into their accounts. My recommendation to them is not to do it unless they have a simplistic single vendor setup such as only Apple iPhone and MacBook with iCloud Passwords app. If instead they have a mixed Windows + Apple setup with 3rd-party password manager, they could accidentally put a new passkey into the os or browser instead of their external password manager and not realize what has happened. This happens because the different parties implementing passkeys all have different agendas that suits their interests and that's what makes the workflow confusing for normal people.

Just absurd.

Or google. If you use android and chrome then it all just works.

But god help you if you want to use a password manager to keep everything in sync; I haven't yet found a way for a mobile app or web page to explicitly signal to the device that the passkey to be created should live in $password_manager and not whatever built-in/on-device key-store exists.

So I only really use pass keys for desktop/web things because that's the only place the "store/read from $password_manager" flow _works_.

On Android 17 (on Pixel) you can select the password service under Settings -> Passwords and passkeys -> Preferred service.

If you have an alternative password manager installed, it will be listed there along with Google's own password manager. iOS has a similar setting but I don't know exactly where off the top of my head.

I have this set to my password manager but I still can't _use_ the pass-keys in my password manager to sign in to most apps.

Maybe... I just ran into an annoying scenario where the largest bank in Canada made an administrative error where they mislinked an account belonging to me to my wife's profile.

I went to a physical branch to get it fixed and was told that branches don't have that kind of ability so I'd have to call customer support.

I called customer support and failed the verification questions because the expected answers were wrong, based on their own clerical error. After failing the verification questions, I just got a "we have to end this call, no additional information can be provided, please visit a branch."

I was able to get around it by calling back in and providing the incorrect, but expected answers to pass the verification step - I imagine, however, that this could have turned into a real nightmare for seniors, or anyone who wasn't able to deduce what the expected verification answers were.

You forgot about the endless frustration and annoyance.

What are the branches even for if not customer support?

Lots of physical locations make the bank seem big/safe/reputable.

Beyond that, it's sales and a place to have ATMs. I have sometimes been able to get a replacement card issued at a branch instead of waiting for one to show up in the mail.

Some branches will accommodate special requests like "can I withdraw $200... in two dollar bills" / take coin deposits but that's been increasingly rare.

In the UK at least, there are very few brick & mortar branches anymore - banks expect everything to be done online.

You can click "try another way" and use your password, and then you'll have access to your bank. But then, you should try to resolve that problem. If you (or a trusted friend/family member) can figure out how to use settings to remove the passkey from your bank's account settings, you can do that, or you can ask a bank teller to help you, instead.

(And, luckily, you won't need a bank teller, because you'll still have access to your account.)

At virtually all banks, the bank tellers cannot help you with login problems. You will have to call the bank's tech support and somehow navigate AI-modulated phone menu hell.

I don't have a citation for you just recent experience, do you have a citation?

My credit union has people who can help with any online banking/website login issues. They aren't tellers, but they are there. You just need to ask to speak to a customer service rep.

ITS NOT SIMPLE AT ALL

1. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant authentication method for enterprise users (companies loose quite a lot of money to phishing).

2. Majority of industry players shared the vision of a credential which is available across the platforms and browsers

3. The vision for collaboration never materialized so everyone went their own way to implement it. Examples would be google rolling out browser (Chrome) managed authentication which led to this situation where even on the same machine you have to remember which browser you used to create the Passkey credential.

4. Interestingly enough the earlier popular name was WebAuthn, Apple started calling it Passkey on fly, given Apple's popularity everyone just caved in.

5. My personal interpretation is that in some sense Apple wanted to be the default password manager on Apple devices.

6. This is when all password manager companies jumped in strongly to save their business and the protocol went into a direction where you can use your existing password manager to store the credential/Passkey as well

Personally its a mess, the phishing resistant aspect has its own benefits though. If you are using it with security in mind then my recommendation would be to use a hardware backed security key with NFC enabled. Everything else is pretty much lipstick on pig, they are worse than passwords in some sense from usage perspective.

Multiple pieces of software vying to be your passkey provider, often using dark patterns so you don’t realize you’re making a choice, and not using the term “passkey” so people are using the technology without knowing what it is or how to research it.

Kind of reflects the state of the web today, where every company wants to be your intermediary in every interaction, from making a purchase to transcribing a meeting.

Which entirely defeats the point of using passkeys. There shouldn't be a passkey provider the "provider" is your device's TPM/secure enclave + your biometric challenge. They are supposed to be mathematically non-exportable, device-bound.

FIDO 1.0 started as two different standards: UAF and U2F. U2F was for USB keys used as second factors (so almost always stored in a TPM-like chip and device-bound, but not provided by your platform and there could be multiple of them). UAF were either provided by your platform or by any software and there was no requirement for them to be stored in TPM. Back in the day, very few platform had any FIDO support built-in, so in practice UAF was always done in software (usually based on whatever biometrics/TPM the hardware provided).

So competing options were the default for early FIDO, getting a default platform option is something that came later.

Which would make the whole scheme unworkable (at least for me).

I’m a little afraid that hardware tokens are getting lost in all the passkey marketing BS. At least they continue to work for now.

passkeys are not meant to be a second factor; they are meant to replace the password as a primary factor.

>to protect against the theft or compromise of your primary device.

I love Yubikeys, but the only additional protection you get by making the passkey hardware-bound is preventing an attacker who has already compromised your operating system from stealing the credential.

But! Unless you are also doing hardware binding of the session (aka cookie) after sign-in, then doing hardware binding of your credential is mostly security theater, because the attacker can just wait for you to sign in and then steal your session.

And there is standards work happening separately for hardening session security, such as DBSC: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-dbsc/

I have no idea if Yubico is involved with DBSC, but I would hope that they are, because it would help them make Yubikeys live up to the security guarantees that I personally feel are heavily implied by their marketing.

>1. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant authentication method for enterprise users (companies loose quite a lot of money to phishing).

This is incorrect. The idea was to provide a phishing resistant primary factor that could compete with the usability of passwords to the point that consumers would actually want to adopt it.

>2. Majority of industry players shared the vision of a credential which is available across the platforms and browsers

This is correct/accurate.

> 3. The vision for collaboration never materialized so everyone went their own way to implement it. Examples would be google rolling out browser (Chrome) managed authentication which led to this situation where even on the same machine you have to remember which browser you used to create the Passkey credential.

IIRC at least Chrome's default on Apple platforms is to save to the Passwords app by default. There are then multiple fallback options in the case that the user isn't using the default credential provider -- ultimately falling back all the way to cross-device passkey sign-in (the QR-code initiated sign in) or Security Key.

The security engineering behind the QR-code cross-device sign-in stuff is interesting: https://www.corbado.com/blog/webauthn-passkey-qr-code#4-pass...

That said, I strongly agree that fragmentation of where passkeys get saved is super confusing and I wish there:

(a) was stronger guidance from the FIDO alliance on both educating users that it's totally fine to have multiple passkeys across different ecosystems (e.g. one in Apple, one in Google), and;

(b) that all the credential managers could figure out a better way to place nice together and make it super clear to the end-user where a passkey is getting stored, what context it's for (e.g. personal vs. work), and actively help them store it in the right place (which might be different credential manager app for personal vs. work!).

> 4. Interestingly enough the earlier popular name was WebAuthn, Apple started calling it Passkey on fly, given Apple's popularity everyone just caved in.

This is incorrect -- passkeys are not just another name for WebAuthn. If you go back and look at the original definition Apple gave for the word passkey, you'll find that it was meant to be a discoverable WebAuthn credential that syncs across a user's devices with end-to-end encryption. There was a bunch of industry thrash around the definition, but it seems like the original Apple definition has largely stuck/settled now, and when passkeys don't sync they're typically called "device-bound passkeys" rather than just "passkeys".

>5. My personal interpretation is that in some sense Apple wanted to be the default password manager on Apple devices.

If you go back and watch the original passkeys announcement from Apple, their stated goal was to create something that is both a better user experience and more secure than passwords. By "better user experience", they meant the act of creating credentials and then repeatedly using those credentials (logging in).

Part of actually achieving that goal means there needs to be something that "just works automatically out of the box" which means there needs to be a built-in credential manager. That said, Apple credential manager had already existed for many many years by the time passkeys came around. The only thing that changed was instead of being solely accessible from inside System Settings (which was hard for the average user to find), the functionality moved into a standalone Passwords app.

>6. This is when all password manager companies jumped in strongly to save their business and the protocol went into a direction where you can use your existing password manager to store the credential/Passkey as well

I think it's a huge positive that all the password managers jumped on board, and that they could jump on board (since WebAuthn is an open standard). I think this is a good thing for consumer choice and for overall adoption and perception of passkeys. A lot of folks (including on this thread) have big tech lock-in conspiracy theories about passkeys, and the conspiracy theories would be even more prevalent without a wide spectrum of consumer choice for credential managers.

>If you are using it with security in mind then my recommendation would be to use a hardware backed security key with NFC enabled. Everything else is pretty much lipstick on pig, they are worse than passwords in some sense from usage perspective.

Passkeys protect against phishing attacks, and you get that protection regardless of whether the credential is hardware-bound or not. That protection comes from the cryptographic binding of the credential to the domain at the time of credential creation.

The only additional protection you get by making the passkey hardware-bound is preventing an attacker who has already compromised your operating system from stealing the credential. But! Unless you are also doing hardware binding of the session (aka cookie) after sign-in, then doing hardware binding of your credential is mostly security theater, because the attacker can just wait for you to sign in and then steal your session.

And there is standards work happening separately for hardening session security, such as DBSC: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-dbsc/

With the "cloud password manager" angle there is some hope of being user friendly, although we're certainly not there yet for most folks.

- Only one specific device can ever login (bad).

- It doesn't limit login to one specific device, therefore it does nothing.

Linking Passkeys to a physical device was always DoA. At least not without a way to enroll every device you own, and strong recovery strategies. But considering how inconsistent every company's Passkey implementation is (inc. many that only allow ONE TOTAL!), it is DoA.

That's entirely service dependent, and the standard doesn't mandate "Service must not allow multiple passkeys"

> It doesn't limit login to one specific device, therefore it does nothing.

It's not nothing. It provides an attestation that you the user are in physical possession of the device, and have passed the challenge to release the key form the TPM (biometrics, pin, something like a yubikey).

Giving your private key to a cloud password vault makes it phishable again (via an attacker getting acsess to your vault, just like with passwords). The private keys are supposed to be non-exportable, and the cloud password managers defeat that as well.

> That's entirely service dependent, and the standard doesn't mandate "Service must not allow multiple passkeys"

Unfortunately, given the laziness, incompetence, and cost-consciousness of organizations like traditional financial institutions, telcos, governments, etc., many of them have & will end up with that implementation.

I use multiple devices and I want to log in to things using only my master password. I also want to be able to back up my credentials to local encrypted storage so I can restore them if my password manager service provider stops operating or becomes untenable.

Too bad for Yubikey. I don't need them any more.

> But you're not going to lose it, because you use a password manager, and the passkey will be stored there and synchronized to all of your other devices

That's just wrong. I use android, my partner uses ios. If he creates the passkey in safari, it's not going to get synced over to my phone. And that's just the first of the family sharing passwords issues. Same person issue is also present if somebody uses an iphone and a windows laptop, or chromebook.

It doesn't help that all modern browsers eagerly try to step in and offer their implementation of passkeys for logins, and they're not featured enough to support the type of shared access or synced access many people would expect from a password manager. How useful is your firefox passwords on an iphone? Or Mac OS's keychain I use as a daily driver on my windows gaming desktop?

> Major password managers don’t even allow you to export your passkeys to a file that you can read/backup yourself

This is wrong. Every single major password manager supports export. Lastpass, 1password and bitwarden all do that.

> It's past time to move off of LastPass. LastPass lost all of your passwords again last month

That just isn't true. Last month, their third party customer support portal was breached. That did not involve passwords.

They all support exporting passwords, but, check your CSV; you won't find any passkeys in the CSV export for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, 1Password, or LastPass.

(Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and KeepassXC do support exporting passkeys to CSV, which undermines the phishing protections, at least somewhat. It’s possible to trick you into exporting your passkeys from Bitwarden and sending the file to an attacker. It’s up to you to decide whether protecting yourself from being tricked into exporting your passkeys is worth sacrificing your ability to read them.)

> How useful is your firefox passwords on an iphone?

Did you try it? That's the primary feature of the Firefox app for iPhone.

(Especially since the Firefox app for iPhone is just Safari's WebKit wearing a Firefox disguise.)

> Or Mac OS's keychain I use as a daily driver on my windows gaming desktop?

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pktq5699m62?hl=en-US&gl=U...

> With the iCloud for Windows app, you can access photos, files, passwords, and other important information from your iPhone or other Apple devices on your Windows PC.

When Apple's your password manager, you use Apple's password manager app to synchronize passwords and passkeys.

It would, if the people implementing it weren't all so obsessed with pushing their own platform-specific solutions over enabling open standards. LastPass works fine on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows, but each one of those platforms defaults to saving passkeys in their own platform-specific store unless you jump through hoops to specifically save them somewhere else.

It's a nice simplifying step to talk about password managers here, but in the majority of the cases this won't be handled by a password manager, but rather by the device operating system, and the device manufacturers really like that lock in.

They're also in an especially good position to abuse it, because they now know every service that you authenticate and the webauthn "attestation object" field lets them set up a side channel with those services such that they can sell additional information about you.

Some people will tell you that the attestation object is not used in the consumer passkey system, so there's no way for this abuse to occur, but since it's usually going to be the device manufacturer who controls the password-manager-like component here, and they're the ones who stand to profit most from this kind of abuse, I think we need stronger guarantees than "the spec says you shouldn't do this unless the user is your employee and you paid for their device".

Until they fix this, I'm sticking with my mess of TOTP authenticators and yubikeys.

That's a red flag to me. It's enough that phone backup systems go out of their way to prevent you from accessing your own data, too, for unexplained "sekhurity" reasons.

> P.S. It's past time to move off of LastPass. LastPass lost all of your passwords again last month, just like they did in 2022. The most similar service is 1Password. If you like LastPass, you'll like 1Password about the same, but 1Password hasn't had multiple terrible security breaches.

That's the most annoying thing about password managers, and a major reason I still don't use them: there exists no password manager that is cross-platform (desktop/mobile in particular), local-first, and isn't sketchy or enshittified or otherwise on HN's current "don't use it, use <whatever> instead" list.

For core security tool class, that doesn't inspire confidence.

I think Bitwarden is on HN's current happy list. (I just use Apple iCloud myself.)

Allowing passkeys to be exported to a plaintext file undermines the phishing protections, at least somewhat. It’s possible to trick you into exporting your passkeys from Bitwarden and sending the file to an attacker.

The major password managers say that this is the reason they don’t allow exporting passkeys, and it’s not false, but they’re also making it harder to switch password managers, which may be their ulterior motive. (You can’t even import those exported passkey files into any of the major password managers, which they would be incentivized to do, if those smaller players had significant marketshare.)

It’s up to you to decide whether protecting yourself from being tricked into exporting your passkeys is worth sacrificing your ability to read them.

Quite complicated to get it all setup (definitely not for non-technical users), but both are GPL and I now have all my passwords available with hardware protection (yubikey on desktop, secure enclave on iOS) in all locations.

[1] To be more accurate, although it was always proprietary, 1Password was also local-only at first, with syncing only supported by putting it on something like Dropbox. They only added native cloud syncing later and eventually made it cloud-first.

I've used pwsafe for years now. I think it checks off all your boxes. Works on desktop and mobile. Local-first but allows cloud if you really want to. No ads or enshittification. Bonus: Open Source. Other Bonus: Not owned by BigTech or LittleTechThatValuesMonetizationOverSecurity

The big risk with passkeys is storing the passkey where it will be held hostage. Don't store it in most single-ecosystem devices like Apple. Bitwarden can export, and I think 1Password can as well.

The main feature of passkeys is that they can't be pasted into a website they shouldn't be pasted in to. That means you can't copy them, by design.

It's an impossible design. It's all just obfuscation, most of which is confusing to users.

[1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

It also, unfortunately, means it's not possible (via most passkey implementations) to back those passkeys up to paper. Which is quite unfortunate: backing up to paper is one of the most stable and human accessible ways of ensuring redundancy and continuity, an inevitable but also oft-ignored part of credential management.

Security folks would like to pretend "solving continuity" isn't a problem, or is a problem that doesn't need to be accessible.

Is writing down passwords something people do? I have countless passwords saved over >20 years and I don’t think I’ve ever recorded one to paper. I even checked a couple of popular password management solutions and they don’t seem to have “print” functionality.

Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.

I've written down one: the master password for my Keepass database, along with instructions on how to get to and open that file. It's in a 'open if I'm no longer alive' envelope.

Yes, it's pretty common.

This is not true. There are device bound passkeys where the private key is stored in a HSM (TPM2.0, Android SE, or apple SE) instead of a hosted service (iCloud, Bitwarden.com). You can just add multiple Passkeys to a single site to have another backup device should your other one be unavailable.

However, this negates the primary stated objective of passkeys, removing the possibility of users being phished, so I'm not sure how long that will remain the case everywhere.

I've also encountered sites that have a login with passkey prompt that then turns around and asks for TOTP 2FA or email confirmation anyway, which to me seems to negate the primary customer benefit of passkeys...

With the exception of Github, and banks.

No major bank revokes your password when you setup a passkey, either.

As to

> No major bank revokes your password when you setup a passkey, either.

If we're talking about requiring 2FA via TOTP or challenge-response hardware tokens or banking apps implementing such, that depends on the country. It's the status-quo in some places. Some banks even put the input field for the token output as a third input in the login form on their website because all customers have them. The rest separate their login form in multiple steps, but they likely require it of all customers too.

Those are absolutely not passkeys. Passkeys are just WebAuthn (from what i can tell).

Kind of feels like "crypto is a type of currency and not all cryptography", or "SQL Server is a specific product of Microsoft".

Wonder if how it happened this time was people read the specs and explanations of WebAuthn, saw "passkey", never seen that word before and assumed it's only ever been used in that context so it can only mean that.

You can have 7 passkeys. You can have 14.

The real failure of passkeys (emphasis on the s!) is that people think they must only have one.

Let's say I have a new account and a single Passkey in the TPM of PC1. I want to log in from PC2, too. How can I do that? (I know there is some trickery with Bluetooth, but I haven't seen anything supporting it, and desktop PCs usually doesn't have Bluetooth connectivity.)

AFAIK some browsers can do some magic to use a Passkey from your smartphone on a PC, but you need to log in to the same browser-sync account from both device (which brings back us to the same issue).

Also the whole thing becomes a mess when you change devices. You need to log into all the services you have ever used to delete the Passkeys from devices you no longer have, and you need to add a new passkey from a new device you bought to all the services you use.

That's the real failure? I think the real failure is that people must have _more than one_. I thought so hard to add all my credentials to 1Password. Now people tell me I should use a Yubikey (or better two or three of them). What do you think, I'm going to register a couple of hundred accounts times three for something I already have (my password manager)?

The real advante in passkeys is in allowing me to log in into a service on a foreign device without typing [my password], which is (honestly) something now sane person should ever do.

I think the reason is because I've anchored passkeys into my understanding of how 2FA works, and the pain of migrating 2FA from one phone to another.

So, I don't want to bother with it.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.liberty.android.freeotpp...

there's. it depends on how the site implemented passkeys.

I'm using multiple devices and passkeys via keepassXC. I haven't lost access or even got locked out of any accounts.

but it's like 2FA, and almost all sites have a clean fallback (backup codes) for 2FA.

so. no clear explanation.

I'm yet to see a site that doesn't provide a password reset (excluding websites without passwords). What inane webdev though that'd be a good idea?

I can safely write down a password on a piece of paper and keep it somewhere phyisically safe.

Passkeys and 2FA are a usability nightmare if you need to recover, or all the security vanishes if you put usable recovery mechanisms for the passkey or the second factor.

Most providers continue to offer email-based recovery in the case that the end-user loses access to their primary factor, regardless of whether the primary factor is a password or a passkey.

And email based account recovery does not make the security advantages of passkeys disappear, which are:

- credential that's guaranteed to be unique

- credential that's guaranteed to be strong

- credential that cannot be phished (due to cryptographic binding to the domain at the time of credential creation)

- changes the incentives for compromising servers (they're nothing worth stealing from the server -- only public keys)

- if/when an app/website transitions to retiring password-based authN, then it will entirely eliminates credential stuffing attacks

those that don't have this built-in (eg. KeePassXC) recommend using Dropbox or some external sync mechanism

but the keys are stored in a file, which you can back up.

> all the security vanishes if you put usable recovery mechanisms for the passkey or the second factor

no, not at all. it still gives you better UX, because when you use the passkey you know it's the site you want to log in to. (because there's mutual authentication.)

Passkeys can too, but there it's even more obfuscated than with 2FA.

Nobody fucking knows.

BitWarden, KeePassXC, and probably a bunch of other password managers have very thorough support for import-export, automatic/periodic backup, sync/merge, etc.

How do you generate a new key if you need one? Same process as a password reset. Does it prevent session stealers? Not at all.

Its "benefit" is grandma can't read it to an attacker. OK, well can grandma click a link and have a session stealer bork her life instead? Yeah, and attackers know that and just shift methods. Session stealing isn't a sophisticated attack, and so all that's being done is shaving a cost on PW resets in the interest of shareholder value, at the cost of security theater and locking up your keys in a single domain that holds control over our access to everything.

In my opinion it's a bad plan, because it elevates certain devices to privileged status, if you lose your phone you are hosed.

Passkeys should be allowed to be synced between devices and stored on password managers in the cloud. I am making my own password manager for my personal use, but have not delved into passkeys.

  > Passkeys should be allowed to be synced between devices and stored on password managers in the cloud. I am making my own password manager for my personal use, but have not delved into passkeys.

The device bound model also completely falls apart in the enterprise, fails to address shared devices and shift workers where employees share the same PC under the same OS profile, now you're back to needing good old fashioned SSO w/ physical MFA (Yubikey) to attest who the user is in addition to attesting the device itself.

Before synced passkeys, the actual standard is a unique key pair per device. The key pair on my phone shouldn't be synced to my laptop, my laptop should generate it's own key pair.

Lets say it is a android phone. Open amazon app. login in the usual user/password + 2FA (like with QRcode or phone). create passkey. done. This passkey would have been now synced to your google account.

Take next spouse phone. Open amazon website or app. try login it will try for passkey but cannot find it. so

- login in the usual user/password + 2FA (like with QRcode or phone). create passkey. done - Now this passkey would have synced to spouse google account.

In future, assuming you have apple or windows laptop. assume you have signed into Google (chrome). Now go to amazon. It will ask - shall I sign in with passkey. Yes, give your macos fingerprint or windows hello or password of that laptop. login Done magically. You dont even need to remember username or password.

Assuming you both have iPhones. You can sync the passkey to icloud account. And for every new iDevice it will be available.

The main bottleneck of passkey would be that all 3rd party sites will have another non-passkey way as backup to login. I have never seen a website that would say - remove all other methods and keep only passkey.

In a way passkey is 99% convenience. If a hacker would some how get your sms and password they can by-pass.

Yes, but you can also add the passkey to your password manager so it's available on all your devices.

>Can I add another passkey on another device?

Yes.

>How many passkeys can I set up for a particular site/app?

I haven't really seen a specified limit on any sites, but also if you're using a password manager it's only 1 passkey for all your devices anyways.

> For now, I’m going to stick with LastPass and use Passwords; because no matter whether I lose my device or not or whether I’m on my own devices or not, I can be sure I’ll be able to get into a site/app.

Your passkeys would be in LastPass as well like your passwords, so arguably the same result regardless of which you use.

>Edit: One final consideration, my spouse and I share user/name passwords for some things (notably Pandora and our Amazon Prime account) since they don’t handle things like family logins well; how do both my wife and I use amazon or Pandora with passkeys? Do we each set up passkeys? How do I get her Pass if that’s not an option?

If it was me I'd add a second passkey to my password manager for your wife under a new entry, and share that entry to her lastpass account.

Or if she's not on lastpass, you could just copy the data from the passkey over to whatever she does use.

Linux is the only oddball here, I had issues getting this flow to work.

If the UX for Passkey improves, I will go all-in on it, I'm at the point I'd love to just completely block passwords from accessing my account, unless I explicitly enable it temporarily by logging on via passkey, I wish some sites would let me lock my account to this level, it would be better. Passwords feel like they just wind up all over the web.

Weirdly enough you can store multiple passkeys for a given domain, which can get confusing in some cases if they dont have normal names tied to them.

Edit: Originally I thought Passwords from Apple was iOS / macOS only, but its not! So I have been editing my original message, sorry for the confusion, I had forgotten that I can login on Windows with my Passkeys from Apple's ecosystem.

As another poster noted, you can transfer them out of Apple's ecosystem too!

Take a guess why.

Passkeys are just a trick for vendor lock-in disguised as a security practice.

Edit:

Apparently BitWarden should work, but my particular passkey was not on there.

Excuse me? The infrastructure for "an apps is trying to login with a private/public key pair, and right now it needs the private key to encrypt some part of the transaction" has existed on Linux since it began.

The problem, as best as I can understand it, is that some/all browsers are not treating passkeys as an extension of the key system that began with ssh(1), even though technically speaking, they are.

What they want is to lock your identity to your android and/or iphone devices.

Additionally passkeys allow services to detect and ban specific password managers, so have fun when the only approved managers that works consistently across all services are Google/Apple/Microsoft. There is already a list of "bad" clients here https://passkeys.dev/docs/reference/known-issues/

Also moving the goalpost. The post I replied to said I couldn’t export it. I absolutely can, and have, with a single click. To another provider. It’s really not a big deal.

> A Public Key Credential Source’s generating authenticator determines at creation time whether the public key credential source is allowed to be backed up. Backup eligibility is signaled in authenticator data’s flags along with the current backup state. Backup eligibility is a credential property and is permanent for a given public key credential source. A backup eligible public key credential source is referred to as a multi-device credential whereas one that is not backup eligible is referred to as a single-device credential. See also § 6.1.3 Credential Backup State.

* https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-3/#backup-eligible

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud-windows/set-up-icloud...

As a bonus, I self host using the open source vaultwarden[1] server implementation, which is packaged in alpine linux.

[0] https://bitwarden.com/ [1] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

Now, is that the official stance? I don't know; but it's _absolutely_ what every current implementation suggests the companies deploying this stuff want.

You can make passkeys better. Like me, you can install a well-funded password manager (well-funded, because it needs the engineering effort behind it to keep up with the ever-changing passkey apis on every platform in the world; screw up and oos, can't log in today!). Then you have one passkey per remote service, and just have to make sure 1password is _always_ installed and perfectly integrated. Easy!

I currently only use passkeys for a few websites that have awkward password login workflows or do not autofill properly from my password manager. I just have a single passkey for each that is synced via Bitwarden. Currently, I see passkeys as using an electronic biometric lock on the front door while passwords are still regular locks on the backdoor. The biometric lock on the front door does not do much for security when the backdoor still exists and I have come across very few websites that support only allowing passkeys. And those that do still run into problem 2 listed above.

Worse, I'm still using LastPass -- but migrating over to Chrome password storage as it syncs between phone and laptop. LastPass doesn't give you the option to not use it for passkeys. It might be the thing that causes me to finish the migration away from it.

The second you have a second device to log in from they are useless. The second you want or need to share a credential (smart or not) they are more work than a password.

The passkey trend seems lead by platforms that want to make it easier to get or stay logged in, Netflix type companies that want to prevent account sharing, and those that value convenience (if one device) over security.

Also since the service does not store your private key, it is more resistant to data-breaches as that is one less potential breach source.

N=1 and I'm sure I'm holding it wrong, but I can only log in to ADP to request PTO from my personal laptop because I set up an iCloud passkey, work laptop does not allow access to iCloud keychain, and you can't request PTO from mobile.

I use ProtonPass and have made it the default password store on every device and browser. This way all passkeys get stored in proton and I can login from any other personal device with proton setup.

I think that's exactly the problem. These are all answerable questions, but getting those answers is confusing for most people.

For example, all the major sites that allow the total of 1 active TotP authenticator app - trying to add one forces to delete the other. Which is fine while you have only one phone and aren't in the process of switching to another one.

The annoying thing is so many services don't even support TOTP. They either want their own proprietary app, still insist on SMS, some of them even try to get you to use voice prints!

It's the same answer when someone asks 'how am I supposed to have a different password for every site' and 'how am I supposed to remember a password of X+ characters.' Use a password manager. Pretty sure every major one supports passkeys by now.

I have a "Family" group in my Passwords app where I share passwords and passkeys with family members for exactly this purpose.

Maybe, at some distant point in the past, there was a plan for a whole system of intercommunicating implementations of passkeys. That is no longer the case. The moment that they decided to include the information necessary to only allow the use of certain passkey vaults in the protocol, and then use that capability to threaten to lock out certain vaults that dared to let users actually be in control of THEIR OWN DAMN CREDENTIALS, it invalidated the entire project in my eyes. Passkeys cannot be trusted, they are designed to let entrenched powers hold your authentication hostage, and should under no circumstances be allowed to take root in the computing ecosystem.

Also, nothing says you have to delete passwords (or alternate means of logging in) if you already have them set up. Having multiple ways in will help prevent lockout.

I hate that I can’t just put a value in a plain text file somewhere (encrypted, let’s say, to preempt the inevitable and low-value response) and rely on that to work when I need it on any device and interface that can accept keyboard input.

I'm now on team "I am outright anti-passkeys and hope they fail and everyone pushing them cries a whole lot about it and never gets over it".

> If I accidentally set up a passkey on my phone (let’s say I use Safari one day instead of my go-to, Brave), can I still log in without that passkey on other devices?

Assuming you have LastPass set up to be an iOS password manager, and it fully supports iOS' passkey implementation: when you create a passkey in Safari, it will ask you if you want to store it in LastPass or in the iOS Passwords app (previously known as iCloud Keychain). If you say LastPass, then it's up to them, but I assume it'll sync to all your devices - it's how 1Password works. If you were to accidentally say Apple Passwords, it'll sync to all your Apple devices automatically, and you can either use Apple's password browser extension on Windows, or you can use the "another device flow" I'm about to detail.

> Is there a way to ensure that passkey can be used on other devices?

As mentioned above, passkeys are intended to sync via your password manager of choice as the primary use case. If for any reason you don't have that passkey synced to that device, _and that passkey is on a mobile device with a camera_, most browsers will give you the option to scan a QR code with your phone. This kicks off a flow that will authenticate you via your phone's biometrics or passkey, then use Bluetooth to first ensure device proximity and then handle the authentication exchange. In the case of iOS, this includes any passkey-supporting password manager, so the passkey itself can be in 1Password; it doesn't have to be in the iOS password system for this to work.

When I first read the above, my hackles were raised given how well Bluetooth operates at times; but every time I've used it so far, it's been fast and flawless. Still, I can see a lot of scenarios where this might not work - e.g., the first one I thought of was a public computer at a library where Bluetooth might be locked down; corporate computers or remote servers could also be troublesome. As far as I know, passkeys don't yet have answers to those scenarios; other than to just use your password + 2FA as you would without a passkey.

As far as I know, both of the above apply to every passkey-consuming site.

> Can I add another passkey on another device? How many passkeys can I set up for a particular site/app?

This touches on your last paragraph, where it indeed could change based on the website. In my experience, every website where passkeys are fully supported - e.g., not ones that are using passkeys as a substitute for FIDO/U2F keys - has let me add multiple passkeys and have not _appeared_ to have a limit. I typically will create a passkey in both 1Password and Apple Passwords just to have a backup, and I can't recall any cases where that's been a problem. Still, I can't say for sure that isn't a problem on any website.

I went all in on trying passkeys when they started to be an option, and I don't have any notable regrets. For me, passkeys have generally worked well when the site is designed to use them well; and at no point have they been a _major_ hindrance. That isn't to say there are _no_ annoyances, though:

- Most websites that support passkeys tend to use them as a replacement for both the password _and_ 2FA, which makes them more convenient. However, a few - Amazon being the most notable I can recall - only use them as a second factor, which just makes them feel a little useless.

- A passkey can _also_ be used as the proof of identity, meaning you can log in in one fell swoop and don't need to enter a username or email address, which is IMO the best showcase for passkeys. Like above, this makes websites that ask you to enter an email address before letting you use a passkey also feel annoying.

- Most web browsers I've used support the QR + Bluetooth flow I mentioned above (otherwise known as Hybrid Transport or caBLE) without issue; Linux has been the odd duck out. Firefox doesn't seem to support it at all on Linux, and Chrome-based browsers do but sometimes are missing what they need and in that case don't show it as an option. Since I sync just about every passkey with 1Password this typically isn't a problem; the exception is the passkey for Apple Accounts, which Apple creates automatically, and (AFAIK) doesn't allow you to enroll your own. Apple Accounts are the only service I've found that does this, though.

- Some websites seem to only offer passkeys as an option if you're on a mobile device, or at least did so at the time of enrolling. eBay and PayPal I think are the two that jump out at me as having done this. Why they did it this way instead of simply detecting if the browser supported passkeys, I have no idea.

All of the above issues have gone down over time, so it's generally been a net decrease in friction over time. And, at least as far as I can recall, passwords themselves continue to be an option in every instance I've enrolled a passkey. So if you like your passwords, generally speaking, you can keep them :P

The sync was actually a compromise to the standard. The idea was unique, device-bound credentials. One person, one device. The private key/passkey on your phone should not be the same one on your laptop, or your tablet, etc. Each device was supposed to have it' own unique credential.

Allowing sync is a security downgrade to the standard, in terms of threat-model guarantees. Pure WebAuthn credentials should be sealed in hardware (TPM or Secure Enclave or equivalent) and be mathematically non-exportable which guarantees zero remote blast radius, an attacker must physically posses the device.

Allowing sync and storing passkeys in a password manager reintroduces cloud account compromise risk and recovery flow hijacks. You lose non-repudiation.

Still more secure than passphrase + TOTP, but doesn't eliminate account takeover attacks against your cloud credential vault, which purely hardware based, per-device credentials do.

And if you're compromised in such a way that an attacker could steal your password then wouldn't they be able to just hijack your session instead?

Device-bound passkeys take care of non-repudiation. With synced keys (e.g., 1password), an account compromise of your vault hands the attacker all your credentials, the private keys are in the vault.

Device-bound keeps the private key sealed in the TPM (or secure enclave), the key cannot be exported, so it cannot be extracted remotely. Even malware on the machine, can hijack your session, but it cannot exfiltrate your private key, TPM won't release it to the service without user verification via biometrics, yubikey, or a PIN. There's also an attestation chain that breaks with synced passkeys. The attacker has no way to get your private key, so the only way to compromise the account is, yes, session hijacking, or physical access to the device with the user present to pass the biometrics check.

None of my desktop computers support Bluetooth. Neither do my wife’s.

That really rubbed me the wrong way, and smacked very heavily of "the big players (MSFT, AAPL, GOOG) can do this - you can't".

The biometric verification also allows to confirm that a certain person is holding the device, and they can easily be matched to existing passport/travel databases.

Great system if the good guys have it, a bit problematic if it's abused by nepo kids to hide their crimes.

I use passkeys with a physical authenticator. How do "they" track and deplatform me with a single click? Can you explain?

This thing you're talking about isn't inherently a thing about passkeys. If a service wants to remove your ability to log in to their service they can do it in a million different ways.

Also, the above poster said:

> deplatform you with a single click across all your accounts

"They" could do it across all your accounts with a single click. If service A decides to require attestation, how is that now affecting all my accounts?

Most of your devices are in the Apple ecosystem and when you are prompted to create a passphrase it will ask you to put it in your iCloud Keychain. Boom, now it is available across all of those

This is how it will work for most people who don’t care about security and just casually use their devices. My boomer mom does this. It’s better than the notebook full of handwritten passwords she was using.

You have chosen lastpass and a multi-ecosystem environment with windows and multiple browsers on each. You have chosen complexity and this is not a limitation of passsphrases as they have been designed for a more common use case.

I use Linux and apple. I have chosen protonpass for my vault. I just tell my OS to save the passkey there and everything works pretty well. If not, my password is right there as fallback. It’s really not that hard.

[1] https://passkeys.dev/docs/reference/known-issues/

well, people are talking about it but it's not making a difference https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/2/passkeys/

The document there is laughable too, because KeepassXC is listed as "not performing User Verification" when it demands manual authorization per request. But this isn't good enough for the passkey people. Ultimately, I see any FOSS option being effectively banned from most services and all important ones. It's a parallel to how you must now be on Cloudflare's nice list or be banned from the majority of the internet.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

I proudly print my entire KDBX file including passkey private keys and I encourage my elderly parents to do so too.

Lightning strikes (and assisting people with cleanup and repair from them) have taught me that there are definitely a class of threats that will leave me with paper but possibly no technology until I can go buy a cheap laptop to restart my digital life, SO BEING ABLE TO BACK EVERYTHING UP IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.

His website says he's in Boston, so I seriously doubt he's ever seen what lightning can do or dealt with a hurricane or tornado.

In general, if you're in the FIDO Alliance and had anything to do with the kind of micromanagement that passkeys can allow, FUCK YOU. Go get a job at Walmart as a greeter. We'll all be better off.

> [When UV is required, KeePassXC must request user verification or not handle the request]

> This implementation is not spec compliant and has the potential to be blocked by relying parties.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406

The only conclusion I can come to when it comes to this and the earlier kerfuffle regarding being able to export the plain text of passkeys is 'the spec is bad and you should feel bad'.

You're basically fucked even if you buy a new one because you need one of the other two to log in.

Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager; you can't login to a password manager without something outside the password manager, usually a password. (That's why they call it "LassPass" and "1Password"; there's one last password you'll still have to maintain.)

No password manager tries to get you to login with a passkey without setting a password, for precisely that reason. Apple, Google, and Microsoft do invite you to login to their password managers via passkey, because it's convenient and unphishable, but they always also allow you to login via password (or "backup codes", which are just backup passwords).

What if the robber hits you in the head and you get brain damage and forget your password?

I had more trouble with a failed 2FA than with a password.

Or straight up betrays you (you slighted them at some family event)

All my passwords and SSH key are already in Bitwarden. When a site starts supporting passkeys, I add that to Bitwarden as well. Now, instead of logging in by auto-filling my username and password, I just press the passkey login button (that hopefully exists) and click on the Bitwarden popup to select the account. It's less button presses for me, and I cannot be phished, nor can my passkeys be leaked on the dark web. All thanks to some fancy cryptography.

Okay, sure, if someone steals my Bitwarden vault by snatching my laptop while it's unlocked or something, I end up pretty screwed. That security aspect did not change, so I still use TOTP for all important services.

Also, I've made one invite-only web app where single-use invite codes and passkeys are the only ways to log in. It was not too hard, it was fun, actually. And I get the peace of mind that account sharing is pretty much impossible were a bad actor able to get their hands on an invite, as is hacking other people's accounts.

(Okay, I concede that I've had to help multiple people who find passkeys confusing as a result of this whimsical decision, and that it just might be that nobody is using my web app for real. So I'm just speaking from nerd privilege here... But it works well, trust me!!)

Consider a user in the Apple ecosystem: you are already conditioned to just do Touch ID or Face ID when asked. I was on Amazon the other day, it prompted randomly for “want to set up a passkey to sign in easier”? I set it up and now I can easily sign in to Amazon on my mac or iphone with zero friction.

For the normal consumer this is not a replacement for “dig out my password manager and copy-paste/autofill my password”, it’s a replacement for “oh it’s prompting for my password again” -> proceed to type your shared password for all sites.

Passkeys lock into a specific device and seem easy until you need to use another device.

But instead of being a credential you own and control, across what could even be a local password manager, it's one password to everything. Maybe it is more secure than a regular password in some cases but it largely seems like a worse fix than existing tools for a problem that has better solutions.

    it's one password to everything

Passkeys are never reused. Even for the same person, they are always unique across websites, and across devices.

"magic fairy dust to login to apps." is the most accurate description I've seen.

Unlike a password or a TOTP token, I know how those work, I know its my responsibility to keep track of them. If my passkey is on my phone what happens if I lose my phone? Do I need a unique passkey per device? How do I rotate them? What if a device gets stolen?

I'm so glad I'm not alone in thinking these are so poorly explained.

Registration generates an asymmetric key pair between your passkey, and the website. Login is the usual challenge/response process. The biggest step forward is phishing resistance. A fake login page can relay a TOTP code, but not the passkey challenge/response.

> Passkeys need a marketing campaign and UX overhaul. I’m a technical guy, but I really don’t understand what the fuck is going on when I use a passkey. All I know is one day it appeared as an option and it let me login to things. I don’t really understand where it lives, what device it’s tied to, how scanning a QR code on Google Chrome on my phone magically logs me in, etc etc.

The user was not educated on this. Hacker News is the top 1% of computer power users. You gotta understand to someone’s grandma or mom or brother who works in real estate none of this makes any sense nor will they educate themselves on what it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301585#46303892

or shared passkeys (where the private key can be synced through something like a cloud service across your devices, see Bitwarden, iCloud)

Sounds good until you realise theres no way to transfer/back them up and you are limited to 100 [1] (previously 25?).

Personally my password manager has almost 4x the entries so hardware passkey solutions are a joke leaving users with single option - upload their keychains to ms/apple/etc clouds where they can be requested by any gov under the sun for x reasons.

[1] https://support.yubico.com/s/article/How-many-accounts-can-I...

as others mentioned, there's BitWarden (cross-platform, self-hostable), but if you want something simple there's KeePassXC (and you can put the store file on a dropbox shared folder)

Also yubikeys have limited passkey slots (100, 25 with old firmware)

There's a strange tension where I want to use pass keys because they are easy to use but also they are easy to lose, so I choose a KeePass synced over cloud and deal with a bit of a hassle by having to copy/paste my passwords.

This is on top of the confusion around enrolling passkeys in your device and synchronizing them

I am a big passkeys fan, and use them on every service I can, but they leave a lot to be desired in terms of user experience. Not sure all of them are solvable, either. The platform vendor side can be fixed: vendors can better integrate with each other to make your passkeys available on every device. But, the issues with how they work across sites and applications is probably not solvable

Simple: it's like a password that I don't have to type in

Easy to use: because I use 1Password and just have it installed on everything. On Android, it can be set as the default passkey provider so, even on mobile, I am using passkeys shared across devices.

Is this "less secure" because I'm sharing the keys through 1Password. I suppose, at some level. But before that, I was simply sharing passwords through 1Password in the exact same way. So, I don't think my security posture has changed any.

What has changed is the UX and IMO for the better. Now I don't have to generate/fill/copy-paste text strings for user names or passwords. 1Password knows what site I'm on and usually responds automatically when I'm in a passkey context. If I have more than one passkey available, because I have multiple accounts (for something like Google Workspace), it shows me options and I pick the one I want.

Honestly, it's mostly a "just works" system and I like it a lot better than passwords.

YMMV, of course.

I like it because I can use discord on even a pretty untrusted computer without providing it any credentials or access to my passkey, and then later when I'm done I can revoke the session.

now multiply it with every web site you want to access.

But don’t log in to important accounts on a public computer, like ever, unless it’s a dire emergency.

I would love for this feature to actually work but every time I've needed it to it hasn't. Literally this week I only had a passkey on my phone, but at the time I was in Linux with Firefox, and afaict the qr code workflow basically requires either chrome or windows 10.

But I'm also a person who generally never experiences the issues some people have with Bluetooth in general. If I ever have an issue with Bluetooth on a computer, I swap out the wireless chipset with an actually good one. Its almost always just bad hardware. I've only had to do that a few times in the last decade though, more modern WiFi/BT chipsets are generally pretty OK. Its the old ones that are near worthless.

Although I will say most of the time I just plug in my USB authenticator. I normally only fall back to the QR code if I don't have my keys on me.

And as an edit, I wasn't aware fully that the QR code is to help assist the BT handshake, I had assumed it was posting a signed request back to the service. My bad, my above comment isn't completely correct. Thanks for cluing me in to the BT requirement for the QR code path.

Which I’m sure is great in theory. But IMO just adds even more complexity to a system that already has several moving parts and is more fragile than it should be.

In fact, if you have your Apple Passwords app set to sync through iCloud, you can:

- Make a passkey on your Mac for a site in the Passwords app

- Go to a different computer (a friend's or whatever)

- Attempt to log in, choose use another device, it'll show the QR code

- Use your iPhone to scan that QR code and sign in, as the iPhone has the passkey synced through iCloud

Note, the same kind of thing is also possible with other password managers as well.

I've seen the same on Android too, and I think there's a difference in how Chrome and Firefox are handling the requests.

Then you get in to cases like a Microsoft Account. You need to use your account to log in to the device that has the passkeys, so the workflow never works properly and you have to fall back to another method.

Amazon is another one. If an app like Libby redirects to Amazon, I get a different, passkey-less password prompt, so I need to have a password readily available.

It's great when it works, but honestly 1password with straight up username/passwords is probably just a better UX in the end.

It’s not that difficult. Spend 10 minutes researching the topic and you’re fine. Passkeys are so much more convenient than having to use passwords. When implemented right, it’s literally one click from opening the login page to being signed in. On all of my devices.

Honestly, this is one of the two things that make me hate passkeys. The key management is a high-friction pain in the ass.

As is, I had to either:

- Keep both on me, and add both - I am at risk of losing both at the same time

- Keep one one me, one in a safe - I have to keep track of which device I've added to which service, and periodically take the backup one out of the safe and iterate through the "new" services

I was never satisfied with either approach, so I ended up with an OTP app with backups.

Software vendors continue to refuse to support, or even accept the existence of, this entire class of use cases for regular consumers (they are, however, more than happy to milk enterprises on convoluted implementations of those).

And now I have another thing I need to carry everywhere.

Until I can tell Grandma to "go down to Walmart and ask the man at the electronics counter for a Yubikey", we still have a few issues.

(No. Ordering online is *not* a valid option in this scenario. If I want to order a Yubikey to this address at this exact moment in time and space, Amazon won't deliver one to me for at least six days at the earliest, based on their rural delivery estimate. Replacing a key is basically impossible.)

When I hit the button to log into Slack, there are like, 3 popups in succession - the last one ultimately asking for my fingerprint. Then when I give it, there is a flurry of web pages that get loaded and redirects that happen until finally Slack pops up again.

There isn't any realistic world in which I check each window to make sure everything is happening right and I am not being MitM'd.

I'm a fairly technical person, and I would be unable to perceive the difference between a really tight security environment and my computer being hijacked.

And many sites block paste from password managers. Passkeys have so many ways to do them wrong that we're going to see all kinds of new and exciting failure modes that lock you out of your account in the future.

My problem is that I manage a lot of accounts for my family which makes passkeys a nightmare. If I’m out and a kid gets chucked into a login flow that happens to require a passkey, I can’t text a password and TOTP code to the adult with them. I know that’s terrible opsec but the reality is people share accounts and passkeys are designed to thwart that.

And of course, passkeys on most all sites don't really improve security since someone can just choose to login with user/pass instead since presumably very few sites allow you to have just passkey.

Also if you use a password manager you may get locked into using that platform. Or ideally using a third party one but then having to pay a subscription, or using an open source option that is not ideal for the average person.

If one uses a passkey as intended and without a password manager and the site truly only supports logging in via your passkey, for all the touted benefits of passkeys, that would be a nightmare if a person loses access to their device, etc.

From (2) I assume that the companies see benefits to themselves. I don't care about benefits to them. I don't see much in the way of benefits to me, so I'm not changing anything if I don't have to.

I'll admit to not having looked into passkeys all that much. Someday, I might. But for the time being, I don't see much point. I imagine that eventually I'll be more or less forced to deal with passkeys in at least some contexts. Will leave that for later.

For now, it's all a big "no thanks" from me.

I've worked in tech 12+ years and I _hate_ when a Passkey prompt comes up, its only ever slowed me down.

But the devs who work on them are quite rabid, and keep dismissing real criticism of their implementation.

Yes, as a wealthy American, you "live in the Apple ecosystem". 99% of the world doesn't. And guess what, they're affected by passkeys all the same. They use a Windows laptop, and either an Android phone or iPhone. A lot of people even have an Android phone and an iPad. And no laptop at all. But at work or school they have to use Windows.

It's quite simple. Besides people "living in a single ecosystem" (discussed above, this is almost nobody), passkeys are only viable (i.e. not very painful to use) if you use a dedicated cross-platform password manager. Yet people who use those - which too is a globally negligible percentage - are exactly the people who tend to have near nothing to gain from passkeys, and only to lose. The majority of them is tech-savvy and they use auto-generated unique passwords. In that scenario, the minuscule improvement in security is meaningless and not worth it.

Ironically, this comment section shows exactly why passkeys are a shit show. Half the people here are exactly those who are coming up with this shit in their FAANG jobs, happily part of the global 1% (of which their tech-illiterate grandma too is part of), and they have no idea or care in the world for the remaining 99%. Unless of course this was simply a land grab for lock-in, which is about as likely.

I thought I was the only one!

I can have the most complex password and create a passkey, but a windows machine could allow a 4 pin digit to access the passkey.

also appreciate your attitude, better than "I work in tech for xx year, i don't understand yy, so yy must be bad."

The average person doesn't know anything about this stuff nor do they care. I also have yet to see a Passkey solution that didn't also have a password on it and a nice little box letting people choose to use the password instead of the passkey. They just added a new layer on top of all the old ones and created confusion. Now people use password and passkey interchangably in conversations and no one knows what they are talking about.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189749#47193048

My read on it all is that FIDO is stuck in some sort of groupthink. They don't feel the boots on the ground confusion around passkeys being opaque. They only care about phishing and being called "insecure" and don't care about anything else. Hence why WebAuthn has additional weird anti features like AAGUID for provider authentication.

Another one of those ridiculous threads is saying you gotta have support for nonsense like user presence verification.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406

To be fair, trusting users with passwords/credentials is how we got into the mess of phishing et al in the first place.

The baking in "which authenticator is storing this passkey" and "require user to provide biometrics/pin to verify presence for this passkey" and "don't make it easy or possible to export passkeys" behaviour is more just control.

I guess it sort of helps if the threat model is complete remote code execution inside the victims brain because you got them to export their keys to you, but it seems more useful for websites and governments whitelisting what hardware and software they deem acceptable.

Reminder that Facebook has warnings and prevention mechanisms to avoid users pasting malicious JavaScript into the console on Facebook.com (which would exfiltrate session cookies).

Preventing users from accessing these keys directly makes sense!

Edit:

Oh yeah, I can also share SSH keys with friends and co-workers. I can freely choose which SSH key to use when authenticating and I can have an arbitrary number of SSH keys for a given server on each machine. Some of this stuff is esoteric, but some is not. Most of the stuff I can do with SSH keys I can also do with passwords but not with passkeys (or at least not always). Finally, as many others have mentioned, the attestation stuff is really ugly and takes control away from the user entirely.

https://www.quora.com/What%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-OpenID-Why-h...

They really should come up with a way to transfer them across devices/password managers though.

Currently I save all login tuples to Bitwarden and store OTP secrets onto Aegis. Could have been 1password and authy, it's irrelevant. The thing is, I only get pwned if both are compromised.

Now with ubiquitous passkeys in Bitwarden if someone has access to my vault unencrypted it's already endgame.

Passkeys are great, and they take a significant amount of work away from the user, and make them much less prone to phishing attacks while also not turning their entire online identity into the property of google. I've had much more luck with onboarding non-technical people into a yubikey vs a password manager. Platform authenticators tend to trip people up. However, the process of adding a new key is getting much more consistent, and legible to people over time, and things will settle on platform authenticators rather than external physical keys for most use cases.

I understand SSH keys, I've been using them for decades, I know where they live, I know how to secure them.

Passkeys are murky as fuck. Is your PW manager supported? Do they sync? Where are they stored? How can I move to another PW manager if I want to in the future? Can I have more than 1 passkey per site? And the list goes on.

I _know_ some of you out there can answer some/all of the questions above but it's mostly on a per-site basis. Passkeys take too much of the control out of my hands and I don't like that.

Even more than that, I hate how they are trying to be pushed on me at every turn. Login -> Want to save a passkey (but they never call it that, they use some other confusing euphemism)? I click "No" and then it proceeds to pop 1Password's UI, then I dismiss that and it opens Chrome's passkey save UI, I dismiss that, and then it opens the OS's passkey UI. It's incredibly disrespectful and unclear.

I never use anything but 1Password but somehow everyone (OS and Browser) try to reach their grubby hands in. This is what scares me, I don't like having to be on high-alert to not accidentally save a passkey in Chrome or Safari and not realize until I'm on a different device and notice it's not in 1Password.

Lastly I trust the developers implementing passkeys... none, I trust them none, zero, zilch. I don't trust them to pick the right defaults, I don't trust their recovery options, and I know they will always pick the configuration that benefits them and not me.

No, for now I'll stick with my as-long-as-you-let-me-make-my-password random passwords which I never copy/paste into random website and be perfectly safe, thank you.

Until device attestation is removed or strongly curtailed in the spec, I suggest you do not create any Passkeys. Which sucks, because it's otherwise a pretty cool tech.

[1] https://passkeys.dev/docs/reference/known-issues/

More sources here: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...

One annoying thing though is that while they recently added password sharing, they don't allow sharing passkeys. Basic passkey sharing would be nice, but it also seems possible to implement fancy sharing features that wouldn't be possible with password sharing. Things like sharing one time use passkeys or time limited passkeys or limited access passkeys or secure revocation of shared passkeys. I hope people are thinking about this.

I also don't understand how the system works when things go wrong (someone hacks your account, etc.). I don't even understand all the ways things could go wrong with passkeys.

Seeing the comments here makes me realize I'm not stupid or ignorant for not understanding these things. Some people do understand them much better than me, but there is no universal answer that emerges after sufficient study.

I will continue to stay away from passkeys.

Look I remember my PIN everything else is in Firefox password manager.

I spent a long time working in the network security field, and you speak truth. The perverse thing about it is that security people should care a lot about usability. If the scheme isn't usable enough, people will figure out how to bypass it or aspects of it.

The technically weaker security scheme that everybody accepts is more secure than the technically stronger security scheme that everybody tries to bypass.

I hope it won’t become mandatory. (I honestly doubt).

It's a shame, because WebAuthn is really great technology. But tech companies are botching the rollout.

The only observable outcome of each of these changes has been making these products less convenient for us to use. At this point I don't think I am alone in being knee-jerk opposed to any further "improvements." I have yet to see a website make a case for a passkey being more convenient than what it is replacing, so I will continue opting out of them as long as I am allowed to.

Passkeys are basically session cookies that are signed by a secure element in one of your devices at the time you log in. That's it. They cannot be phished because there is no password to steal. If I had to guess, the basic flow is something like this:

1. When the passkey is created, the device's secure element coughs up a public key or something to the server representing itself as a trusted device

2. When a user logs in, the server issues a challenge (basically a random number) to the device and says "sign this with a private key that corresponds to one of the trusted public keys I have"

3. The secure element signs the challenge and sends it back

4. The server goes through its list of trusted device public keys until it finds one that verifies the challenge response. If it finds one, it logs you in. If it doesn't, you don't log in

Step (1) is probably bootstrapped with a username/password and second factor like SMS 2FA, OTP, or email 2FA.

Even if this isn't exactly how they work, it's a plausible implementation. Nothing about this requires vendor lock-in. The various secure elements that can produce passkeys come from many different places, so I'm sure sufficiently motivated open source people could create a firmware TPM that is certified for use with passkeys or something if they cared enough.

Every other time I open the Costco app (needed to walk in to the store, since I don't carry my card and they refuse to provide Apple Wallet integration) I get asked to switch to passkey, without a way of saying "don't ask me again".

If you're in any position to determine this in your company/software, please stop this pattern. Give users the option to say "stop asking me about passkeys".

As someone with ADHD a passkey is something I can lose easily and I don't want my accounts to be tied to any specific device. What if I have to upgrade my laptop tomorrow because one I use got bricked? Sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Password on the other hand I can remember for dozens of services, each very long.

The one thing I would ding that approach on is recoverability, though. If a fire burns that down, it's gone.

You can’t use any random password-manager with passkey support.

I use Bitwarden for everything and have to have MS Authenticator installed just for this 1 login.

Super annoying.

I'm on a laptop running Ubuntu, I use Firefox as my browser, and I use 1Password as my password manager. I have both the browser extension and native Linux application installed, and they sync/communicate with each other (so if I unlock the native Linux app, the browser extension also unlocks).

When I open my Amazon.com item in 1Password, it has a helpful link to https://passkeys.directory/details/amazon which tells you clearly, step-by-step how to set up a passkey. Great! I love clear directions.

But when I get to the step when I click the "Set Up" passkey, Firefox gives me an address bar pop-up saying "Touch your security to continue with www.amazon.com".

Huh?

I don't have a security key. My laptop does have a fingerprint reader, which I use to unlock my screensaver (and it's integrated with some KDE keyring thing), so I tried putting my finger on that. Nothing. I opened the 1Password extension. Nothing there, just normal view of my login info. I opened the 1Password native application. Nothing there either.

Maybe it's a Firefox issue, or a Linux issue? So I tried setting it up on my phone (running GrapheneOS and their Chromium-based browser), which has the 1Password app installed. I logged in, and this time got far enough that 1Password brought up a prompt asking "Do you want to save this passkey?" I tapped Yes, and it then immediately told me "Unable to save passkey: For security reasons, 1Password did not save this passkey. The associated URL for this passkey does not match the selected app." So... does that mean 1Password is refusing to touch the passkey because it didn't come from the com.google.chrome Android application?

This whole experience has re-affirmed my skepticism of passkeys in practice. I think it would be awesome to have public/private key security on my online accounts. I think it would be great if I could log in without having to copy/paste passwords (when autofill doesn't work, or for TOTP codes). But I have zero confidence that this opaque stream of bytes will actually work to get me logged in to my account. When the 1Password input field detection fails, I sigh, copy/paste my username and password, and then forget about the mild inconvenience after about 30 seconds. I don't even want to think about what would happen to an account if the only way to log in to an account was via passkeys.

Every advancement in "security" has assumed the service needs to more strictly identify the customer, without caring about the customer's trust for the service, or experience with performing the identification ritual.

So when your bank asks you for a code or your mom's maiden name, they never offer anything to verify they are who they say they are. whenever I ask they say "of course we're from chase, we just called you", without realizing how absurd that is.

Now Passkeys suffer an even worse dilemma. Now the customer has 4 dimensions of tools to record & use in order to log in. Did I use email, google, facebook, apple ID to log in? Did I save this code via phone, text, authenticator app (which one, there are multiple incompatible ones)? Did I use a passkey ? where is that passkey located? my phone, my browser storage, my authentication extension.

We started with a single dimension of email + password to log in. Now it's an entire decision tree that has to be recorded. How do you even record this?

  disqus :  credential = email, password = "see bitwarden", 2fa = microsoft authenticator, passkey = "on iphone in icloud"

  viator: credential = google sso, password = same, 2fa = symantec, passkey = "edge on windows 11 laptop in office" 

I thought engineers were tested for scaling during the interview process. This protocol doesn't even scale to a single site.

Additionally this puts the same players in control of your logins - want to sync your passkeys? - enable "iCloud Keychain", or some other 'trust me bro' app that will 'securely store/sync your data' - no thank you.

In perfect world users should be able to generate a certificate, upload it to a couple nfc capable ubikey like devices that blow a fuse afterwards preventing from additional writes/reads and use that to login to every app ever. You would buy such devices in packs of 3, upload same cert to all, hide the other, burry the third.

i'm gonna stop you right there

Passkey biometrics also allow you to confirm certain person is holding the device right in this very moment, and not receiving a TOTP via walkie-talkie. Especially important for kinetic sanctions.

If you check out their Terramare group of companies those guys are still using typewriters. Unless you're US/UK millionaire I recommend to stay as analog as possible with physical password book and TOTP/yubikey.

Same with the push for "post-quantum crypto" and elliptic curves. I feel my systems get significantly more attention when using 8k RSA than any of its modern replacements. While I love wireguard the transition to ED25519 felt way too smooth..

And if the pros are using typewriters in 2026 it's not a signal for me to put even more eggs into the US-megacorp dominated basket who treat me like an NPC who can be droned at will.

I get reluctance about being dependent from the US but your reason seems a bit off

That is not the case. The entire setup/enrollment/add a passkey to your account processing is DMV inspired.

And there's your blocker. Being limited to only devices from a single vendor is horrible, and a firm no from a lot of people.

> Now we can put on the tinfoil hat and say how this fosters vendor lock

The fact that you call it a tinfoil hat type issue is just insane to me. Literally every person in my household has some apple devices and some other ones (android, windows, etc). And some of them have switched back and forth.

Plus, the "ergonomics" of logging into a website on a random device to check something are awful.

Maybe for a lot of tech people, I don't think the general public understands the risks enough to care.

What would you answer if grandma asked you what happens if she loses her physical key?

If you are confused about digital passkeys, you can use a physical yubikey or nitrokey and tap it when it blinks. You can treat them like a credit card or house keys.

Asking people to keep up with and remember passwords is and always has been the thing that was invented with zero understanding of the consumer brain.

Isn't that just a euphemism for "we mandate passkeys"? Saying 'exclusively allow' draws the reader's attention to the positive (allowing!) while de-emphasizing what's not permitted.

Regardless, I think it's a lot less of an issue for services exclusively oriented at people in tech instead of just everyone. Even then, there is a barrier to adoption besides just understanding it, which is relying on new software or owning a piece of hardware. It's a lot messier, while text remains universal and has no dependencies.

You can't phish a passkey, and you don't rely on the user providing you 'hunter2' on every site.

As for vendor lock in? No. The specs are open. You can run the code on a microcontroller, or, you can keep it in your arm with something like the Vivokey Apex. Note that the FIDO2 for the Apex is an open source Javacard applet.

The UX on the other hand is not great. If you have a password manager, your OS may prompt you which target to store the passkey with.

That is not true. Passkeys support device attestation, enabling websites to lock you out if you don't use their approved devices. Which is happening with all the big platforms right now.

You want anecdotes? Ok. I’ve had elderly adult relatives who aren’t good with their devices tell me unprompted they’re using them and like them when I mentioned the word out loud to myself using my phone around them.

These are people who don’t know the difference between apps and the web. Who have 200 tabs open because they don’t know what tabs are so a new one just gets opened automatically all the time. Can’t tell some websites apart. Who change their passwords on every login to some sites because they can’t get sign in right.

Yeah if you want to write them down or refuse to save passwords outside text files or demand they live on a security key on your keychain you’ll have a hard time. You’re being 0.0000001% of the user population. You’re not representative.

They are a MASSIVE UX win. A MASSIVE security win.

I’ve logged into my work computer with a passkey on my personal phone, no issue. It’s fine. They’re backed up locally. It’s fine.

The biggest problem, which is getting better and somewhat a transition problem, is sites using terrible UX to trigger the workflow. Those that follow the suggestions or close to it are great.

I love passkeys. I just don’t get the confusion.

She doesn't know how she created one, she doesn't know what it is, and I don't know how to explain to her that if her PC dies I won't be able to help her log back into her account. I'm not even sure how I'm going to migrate this thing to a new PC for her.