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Passkeys might really kill passwords (www.theverge.com)

submitted 9 months ago by Ninjazzon@infosec.pub to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Passkeys: how do they work? No, like, seriously. It’s clear that the industry is increasingly betting on passkeys as a replacement for passwords, a way to use the internet that is both more secure and more user-friendly. But for all that upside, it’s not always clear how we, the normal human users, are supposed to use passkeys. You’re telling me it’s just a thing... that lives on my phone? What if I lose my phone? What if you steal my phone?

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[–] monko@lemmy.zip 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (14 children)

Glad this is being discussed. Having worked adjacent to the authentication market, I have mixed feelings about it, though.

There are a few problems with passkeys, but the biggest one is that no matter what, you will always need a fallback. Yes, Apple promises a cloud redundancy so you can still log in even if you lose every device.

But that's just Apple's ecosystem. Which, for what its worth, is still evolving. So the passkey itself is phishing-resistant, but humans still aren't. Fallbacks are always the weakest link, and the first target for bad actors. Email, or sometimes phone and SMS, are especially vulnerable.

Passkeys in their current iteration are "better" than passwords only in that they offload the fallback security to your email provider. Meanwhile, SIM swapping is relatively ready easy for a determined social engineer, and mobile carriers have minimal safeguards against it.

Usability? Great, better than knowledge-only authentication. Security? Not actually that much better as long as a parallel password, email, or SMS can be used as a recovery or fallback mechanism.

I'm not saying passkeys are bad, but I'm tired of the marketing overstating the security of the thing. Yes, it's much more user-friendly. No one can remember reasonably complex passwords for all 100 of their online accounts. But selling this to the average consumer as a dramatic security upgrade, especially when so many still run passwords in parallel or fall back to exploitable channels, is deceptive at best.

[–] Flumpkin@slrpnk.net 1 points 9 months ago

My view is that for most people who still use bad passwords it will be a huge upgrade. So even though I use super strong passwords, every service and bank has extra security features because they must cater to simple passwords. So you have to check your email for a stupid code and shit. Or worse, give them your phone number!! Which is an outrage because it's linked to my government id!!!

Passkeys raise the lowest security ceiling, meaning there should be less checks needed. That's what I'm excited about lol.

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