Ricky Mondello (@rmondello@hachyderm.io)
hachyderm.io
If you actually read the “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.” post going around, you’ll find a transparent attempt to clumsily string together a conspiracy. The post is predicated on the idea that a feature of WebAuthn called “attestation”, which is only used in high-assurance and usually corporate scenarios, and usually with physical hardware security keys, will be leveraged to hurt people, somehow. The post posits that a website like X will bait and switch users: first, you get a passkey. Then, later, scary “attested” passkeys! This simply isn’t possible to do because attestation isn’t supported on the web for mass market, consumer authentication. Attestation for passkeys (software-based, syncable credentials) is antithetical to their mass market goals, and would freeze out independent, non-corporate-backed credential managers. It’s an explicit non-goal of the designers of passkeys, who work together in a forum anyone can join. And trust me, websites and apps like banks repeatedly asked for attestation at the beginning of the industry’s passkey journey. The platforms, browsers, and credential management apps have held firm that the goal of passkeys is reducing phishing and **not** some kind of trusted computing scheme. (And I will note: over my dead body!) Besides the theory of the case being fundamentally wrong, there are several things that make the post disqualifying in terms of arguing something useful or important in the realm of security, privacy, and user authentication: 1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!) 2. Describing TOTP as a “great solution” for adding security to a password-based account. When the most common threat model on the web is phishing (a word the post never mentions!), TOTP hardly buys you _anything_. TOTP is phishable. 3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed. There are bad things happening in tech and untrustworthy people and companies do exist, but they’re largely in the AI space, not the “let’s stop people we love from getting compromised through phishing” space.
  • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 day ago

    I swear most people have forgotten what TOTP was used for in the first place - two-factor auth to protect people re-using passwords getting hit by password breaches on other services, people using low complexity passwords, and to protect people’s breeched devices (e.g. computers getting viruses or malware or drive-by credential nabbers that give the attacker access to your credentials in some way). In short, to solve some poor security practices. 2FA via TOPT still solves all of those problems.

    Passkeys fix a different problem. On their own as a technology they essentially just increase the quality of a password, while tying that password to a single device. So they fix the problems of re-used passwords, and unsophisticated passwords. But with many implementations they fall back to being single-factor auth - if a user has access to your device, they can use the passkey (with exceptions such as passkeys stored on a physical second-factor like a Yubikey that requires physical approval to use).

    TOTP meanwhile requires two devices to be accessed by design.

    As myself and most tech-aware users already use unique, sophisticated passwords - they don’t solve a problem for us.

    However, if businesses allow passkeys as a simple password alternative, while still allowing TOTP as a second factor, I’d be happy to do so for critical access items (mostly banking). However, I’m not aware of this being the case for any common implementations in major businesses.

    Passkeys are just ‘Yubikey without the Yubikey or physical approval’ - pointless to me. False sense of security even.

    • IanTwenty@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Maybe one extra thing you are missing is passkeys are resistant (not proof) to phishing. The user returns an ‘assertion’ that:

      uses the private key to digitally sign a challenge value from the server, together with contextual information such as the requesting origin

      https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Authentication/Passkeys

      It useless to pretend to be the bank as you’ll get an assertion from the user you can’t replay and the user’s passkey implementation should spot the origin is wrong and refuse to sign it anyway (as I understand it).

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Maybe? I’d say that TOTP is probably more ‘phishable’ than passkeys - but I doubt there are actual stats on it.

        If an end-user is the kind of person that’s fooled by a fake bank website that is on the wrong domain with a sketchy certificate - and approve 2FA requests without much thought - then it is probably likely they’d be fooled by a fake bank website that says, “per our recent updates, [yesterday’s date] is the last date to switch to using an updated web browser. Our bank website is no longer compatible with this web browser, please open one of these browsers [list of any major browser useragent not identified as the current browser] and attempt login again”.

        That could either completely bypass their pre-configured bank passkey with legacy login to the fake bank, or the attackers could just pushing them to configure a new passkey to the fake bank on the new browser (the attackers wouls set up a real passkey to the real bank in parallel, using the supplied credentials in the background).

        There is certainly proof of concept and examples in the wild of significant cases of people being tricked into approving additional devices with passkeys.

    • Ooops@feddit.org
      5·
      1 day ago

      Passkeys fix a different problem.

      In my eyes the problem is that passkeys do not fix a problem. They just shift it to another layer…

      I can backup a password however I like. I can backup a TOTP authenticator (or specifically the secret that works with every one of them) however I like.
      I can not however backup a hardware device with my passkey.

      And the websites supporting passkeys obviously know it and explicitly warn when you don’t have an alternative way of logging in configured as it’s possible that simple hardware damage or loss locks you out of your account. Thus the “fix for a problem” is now relegated to a shiny new way of conveniently pressing the button on a key instead of typing and remembering passwords, while the actual attack surface is still there but now sitting in alternative login/account recovery instead.

        • Ooops@feddit.org
          5·
          1 day ago

          Yes I can backup a software one. But that’s not the point. Passkeys are advertised as the future for common people as they eliminate the biggest issues: phishing.

          But then they don’t advise people to use software passkeys, back them up and keep them save. Instead they tell them to configure an alternative/recovery login alongside the passkey should it be lost or damaged.

          They take a security feature, instantly remove the additional security and make it into a “you don’t need to remember and type your password”-convenience thing. Yeah, great. A password manager could’ve already provided that convenience.

          So in the end those more technically-minded that will look at this and decide to use a software passkey so they can back it up will get some additional security they need much less (they are not the primary target group for phishing), and some convenience they already had (because they are already using a password manager).

          Passkeys aren’t controversial because they are bad. They aren’t. They are controversial because the actual way they are used makes zero sense for the purpose of added security. Which raises the question what the actual goal is.