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Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won't work on another device.

Now I don't know if that key can be stolen or not, or if it's really more secure or not, as people have really unsecure pins.

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[–] 39 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The problem with passkeys is that surrender of a physical key is not protected by the 4th amendment and subject to seizure. From a security perspective, I agree that passkeys are good. But I only use a physical key as a secondary factor. Never a primary.

The courts have ruled that you can't be forced to give up a password or passcode. (We'll have to see if the current court will keep this precedent.)

Until we get better privacy protections, I'm not trusting passkeys whole cloth.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can protect your passkeys with a knowledge element.

    But I don't see your use case. Passkeys are about logging in to webservices, not about protecting devices.

    Web service providers can always be ordered to surrender your data by a court. Very few of them even try to encrypt your data. And for those that do, a court order could still force them to intercept your password and decrypt the data.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If you replace passwords with passkeys that must be protected by a password, you haven’t replaced passwords, you’ve just moved where the attack can happen. While I think there’s certainly value in that, it’s very disingenuous to say you’ve replaced passwords.

    Passkeys are used for more than web services and have the possibility to replace other security options elsewhere (being something you have, one of the three secrets possible). Their lack of protection, at least in the United States, is a very serious problem. Your points do nothing to address this and highlight just how bad the situation is.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You should really read up on multi-factor authentication and Web-Authn.

    Your problem seems more that you don't trust Google to store your private keys in their cloud.

    And that's fine. You don't have to do that. But don't be confused to think that's the only option. You can buy a yubikey or a Trezor model T if you prefer.

    Passkeys are just a marketing term for Web-Authn. When you use asymmetric keys for other purposes, it's not passkeys.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I missed the part where I said I don’t trust Google. You seemed to have ignored everything of substance in my response, namely putting a password on the passkey doesn’t remove passwords and the extension of things like FIDO2 beyond web auth.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I didn't ignore it, I said you need to read up on the basics.

    Protecting a private key with a password is totally different than authenticating with a password and you don't see to understand that difference.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It doesn’t get rid of passwords, which is what I said when I said it was a disingenuous claim. It just moves the attack surface, like I said before. You haven’t bothered to demonstrate even a passable understanding of my original comment and the security issues I raised as a security professional because you appear to want to dunk on me. I’ve been having this conversation for years so sorry not interested.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That suggestion up thread to read up on how webauthn/CTAP2/FIDO2 works?

    It’s a good suggestion. I would take it.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sorry, you're just wrong. It does get rid of passwords as the authentication mechanism and replaces it with a private key.

    Claiming otherwise is being ignorant on how it works.

    Even if someone knows the password to your phone or yubikey, they still need your phone or yubikey. Knowing just the password is useless. If you are a security professional, you would know this is called a possession factor.

    If you've been having this conversation for years, you really ought to know better.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don’t think you understand what an attack surface is.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Lol. I guess you learned a word from the CEH you flunked.

    Edit: but yes, passkeys greatly reduce the attack surface compared to a password.

    And when using a properly hardened device like a yubikey, you can actually minimize your attack surface to as low as it's ever going to be in a web context.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There is no implementation right now that enables you to own and manage your own passkey backups without Google it icloud.

    Additionally, the attestation feature is one step away from banks and other sites mandating specific implementations, preventing people from using software tokens or OSS managers.

    Passkeys is great, and I am eager to recommend it to everyone, but without those items addressed, it's a trap door, and one bitflip away from very strong lock in.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected. So if you secure your phone with one of those, access to it is under 4th amendment protection. Given this, I'm curious how passkey legality would work out since it's a physical key, but access to use it would still require a knowledge element.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Passkeys will not protect you against the government.

    As I said elsewhere, it's for web services. The web service provider will have to surrender your data on a court order. They can decouple it from the passkey. The passkey doesn't encrypt your data at the provider, it's only used for authentication.

    If you really want to protect your data, you will need to use a different encryption solution. Something like full disk encryption with a complex pass phrase.

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