Misleading headline. Appropriate one:
FIDO Alliance’s implementation of passkeys maybe a slippery slope. Beware.
Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.
Submitted 2 weeks ago by cm0002@toast.ooo to cybersecurity@infosec.pub
https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-not-use-them
Comments
waltersf@bookwyr.me 2 weeks ago
daychilde@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Author’s bullshit that passwords are inherently insecure is, well, bullshit. WEAK passwords are weak, yes.
Meanwhile, anything that can fail if I lose my device (or it gets stolen or broken) means it’s just a matter of time before I’m permanently locked out.
I know how to secure my passwords. We need to train people how to generare secure passwords and manage them effectively.
Kissaki@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
When I finally tried out passkeys, Windows required me to use Windows Hello with a PIN, so login to my account was now with a (length limited) PIN instead of my account password. Soon after, my mainboard broke, meaning the keys were gone too. What a hassle. I don’t use them anymore.
(I’m aware the Windows store may be just one of multiple options. It’s what you’re being pushed to, supposedly the straight-forward convenient way. It was not.)
adespoton@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The article has some good points, but is also reductivist.
Passkeys can indeed be abused, but they solve a security issue that was being abused in the wild that TOTP doesn’t solve. They essentially close a security gap connected to shared secrets that ensures they can’t be abused by caching attacks in the same way as TOTP. They do this by exchanging some of your personal privacy for third party trust — and this in turn means that the third party is no longer storing your password in active memory, making it less prone to data leaks.
But the big secret here is that passkeys aren’t exactly the thing companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple are telling you they are: that’s a single (or two, really, as MS uses a different implementation) of passkeys that slave your side of the shared secret to a mobile device or browser.
Passkeys work fine in software (1Password works as a passkey vault, for example) or in hardware (Yubikeys are fully FIDO compliant and so implement everything but the transport mechanism). So it’s perfectly possible to use a safe and secure passkey that isn’t leaking data to the second party.
The problem with passkeys is that it’s also possible to tie them to a TPM, which is controlled by the second party, not you. And this is the default method that Google, Apple and MS default to presenting when a passkey creation prompt comes up on “their” devices.
So passkeys aren’t the trap; the pushed implementation is.
Get a Yubikey or a password manager that properly implements them and they’re significantly more secure than TOTP. It’s essentially the same technology that Apple uses for Apple Pay.
Oh, and of course, passkeys don’t get rid of passwords; they get rid of indiscriminate password use. You still need a shared secret to back the passkey; it just tends to be a longer “token,” “key,” or passphrase. At the end of the day, that’s no different from a traditional password except for the accepted length and how often it is used.
TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
So, if Bitwarden, all good?
4am@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Well…for now? Bitwarden looking to enshittify lately. But yes right now Bitwarden passkeys work great across multiple devices desktop and mobile. Been using them for a number of years now.
SW42@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I use vaultwarden with the bitwarden clients on my devices. Works a treat. Make sure you know what you’re doing and have an effective backup strategy if you decide on this!
moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 2 weeks ago
KeePass.
semperverus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We have been rolling passkeys out at work and have been having to explain to our users the difference between “Device-Bound” and “Synced” passkeys.
Synced passkeys are by nature more vulnerable because they touch the internet. They can be stored in regular password vaults and so on, tosses onto google drive, etc. and then get those compromised, and because passkeys come with an extremely high level of trust, that is a fully busted account at that point. As such, we can’t justify allowing synced passkeys on corporate, especially for admin level accounts.
With that being said, for non-work accounts in your day to day life, synced passkeys are going to be the way to go for privacy and data sovereignty, but it moves the onus of protecting that data onto you the user. I am able to handle that, as are many reading this, but a lot of folks do not have the technical prowess to defend themselves. When I am off the clock, I will champion privacy-focused solutions day in and day out. Work can do work things on work’s dime and work’s time, but they will not touch my personal space - I will not abide it.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yubikeys are the best of both worlds if you can get them — work paid for mine, but they’re my keys, not theirs, so I can use them for personal accounts as well as work accounts, and not have to worry about them being bound to a work device or insecure from being synced keys in a password vault.