We had originally planned to go all-in on passkeys for ONCE/Campfire, and we built the early authentication system entirely around that. It was not a simple setup! Handling passkeys properly is surprisingly complicated on the backend, but we got it done. Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out...
Yeah I didn’t understand passkeys. I’m like why is my browser asking to store them? What if I’m using another browser? Why is my password manager fighting with my browser on where to store this passkey?
I felt so uneasy.
So I decided not to use passkeys for now until I understood what’s going on.
The answer to all of these questions is “For the exact same reason they do all these same things with passwords”
Think of a passkey as a very, very complex password that is stored on your device (or in a password manager) that you can use to log into websites with without ever having to know what the password is, and it’s never stored on the site you’re logging into, even in a hashed format, so it literally can’t be exposed in a breach.
It’s the exact same technology you use to connect securely to every website you visit, except used in reverse.
But that’s the problem isn’t it? You have no idea what the value is, your browser on your laptop or phone you are going to lose/eeplace/reset does. Password managers are still not well understood or used by the masses and browsers stepping in here is a recipe for disaster
With chrome and Firefox maybe the user is syncing them with a profile. But that profile is also probably using a passkey on that very browser. A regular user is going to walk face first into this.
Passkeys are unique cert pairs for each site. The site gets the public key, you keep the private to login under your account. The site never stores your private key.
To store them simply, turn off your browsers password/passkey storage. Store them in your password manager along with other sites passwords.
Sounds similar to the SSL stuff, like for GitHub and stuff. I guess the preference in that case would be my password manager as it stores my password already.
Perhaps it’s best I pay for Bitwarden premium now and use those hardware keys people are recommending.
Also thanks!
Because its the same shit. passkeys are essentially passwordless ssh certificates. we’ve had functional MFA for ssh literally since its inception.