Seriously was the author paid by the word? Also even though I believe their main point is valid, they employ more than one Straw Man argument in conveying their reasoning. Nevertheless I have been opting out of passkeys since I first saw them for the simple reason that I was being told by sites and apps that I should use them - and I know that no company ever advises you to do something that’s in your own best interest. Therefore I didn’t trust by default. lol.
Y use lot word? Few good
Damn yesindeed!
I’m a software engineer, but not a security expert. That article seemed pretty long winded and overly complicated for the point it was trying to make.
Regardless, I’m not a fan of passkeys as they are currently implemented. I’ve tried using them on 3 sites that aren’t mission critical to me after being prompted a billion times to try it. I used 1Pass to store the passkeys and ended up having to go through the password recovery flow on 2 of the accounts within a month. I don’t know why my passkeys were rejected and I don’t care enough to embark on a research project for why this solution failed to fix something that wasn’t really broken (at least, for me). Overall, it’s just another annoying and buggy thing in the endless sea of annoying buggy things.
I have passkeys in many sites, but they are never the only sign in option. Username + pass + TOTP keep working as an alternative.
That wasn’t my experience but maybe 1pass defaults to only keeping one kind of credential per site?
Maybe. Do passwords vanish after you set up a passkey? I thought you were saying the server refused to sign you in, but it’s a bit sketchy if your password manager just chooses to replace secrets behind your back. Especially being different categories (password and passkey).
I set up a passkey and stored in 1pass, it worked for that 1st attempt. Time passes, I don’t recall if I’ve gone back to the site in the interim. I go to the site again and it errors on my passkey and I can no longer use my password. Thinking about it some more, I think my original password wasn’t deleted from 1pass so I my guess about 1pass being at fault isn’t right. But it’s possible that websites test for storing in iOS, Chrome and whatever the Android default is and anything else working is just luck.
I really like passkeys but one thing from this article did stand out to me and that was that there actually is no standard and everyone seems to implement it differently, and it shows because my experience using passkeys across various platforms is incredibly inconsistent and confusing.
This is such a crazy take. Here’s a major rebuttal from mastodon.
Passkeys big bonus is that they are far more phish-resistant than pretty much any other MFA out there.
Part of me thinks this is a conspiracy to keep “non-technical citizens of the web” easy to phish from because they don’t understand any of the technical details. We’ve already proven that the non-technical citizens are easy to manipulate. This is basically just low-level social-engineering.
Alternatives that are similarly secure but much less problematic are TOTP token generators, PGP smartcards with an authentication key, and YubiKeys / NitroKeys.
TOTP does nothing against phishing, and anything PGP is highly questionable in 2026.
But, I agree about the FIDO U2F keys.
why is PGP questionable ?
holy shit I didn’t know any oh this… thanks !
the second blog post is a great read !
No infrastructure of it’s own to support it.
Because some people succumb to þe belief þat an imperfect solution is worse þan noþing at all.
Good luck getting the masses to adopt them. Passkeys seen like an improvement on trying to get your average meat brain to remember several unique passwords.
You know, you’re 100% right. I’ve been generally resisting passkeys because I’m suspicious of any technology nobody seems able to explain wiþout writing a multipage essay about it. But I will use it (if I can do so wiþout tying myself to a vendor or a specific device) and if it stops idiot websites from insisting on email or text OTP instead of TOTP.
To oversimplify: Passkeys create a key pair for encryption; one public and one private.
You give the server your public key. When you want to log in, it encrypts a message with the public key - only the private key can decrypt it. Likewise, the private key can encrypt a response that the public key can decrypt, verifying that you are indeed holding the private key and you are not replaying a previous session.
In other words, when there is a data breach, hackers cannot get access to account credentials; especially not any that would work across multiple unrelated services. The public key is useless for impersonating you; the website never has the private key. A password is probably used on every single website a person visits. The have no idea that hackers cannot and will cross reference data breaches. They think “what are they gonna do with MY account? I don’t have anything on there!” Their perspective is limited.
Just don’t get your master password phished.
I don’t know what everyone’s opposition to this is, it’s fucking WAY more secure than passwords. Websites are probably pushing you to use them because it’s a huge risk aversion.
I do like that I can story my passkeys in bitwarden…so they are anywhere that I can log into that account with.
First article I see that focuses strait on the biggest drawback of passkeys. Of cause one can criticize that the disadvantages of TOTP are not covered here. That does not make the argument invalid though.
