- Big Tech has implemented passkeys in a way that locks users into their platforms rather than providing universal security
- Passkeys were developed to replace passwords for better account security, but their rollout by Apple and Google has limited their potential
- Proton Pass offers passkeys that are universal, easy to use, and available to everyone for improved online security and privacy.
Not commenting on the merits of the blogpost’s arguments, but Proton is selling their own product here too
And if you believe in our mission and want to help us build a better internet where privacy is the default, you can sign up for a paid plan to get access to even more premium features.
Translation: don’t give those other guys money, give us your money!
The horrors of giving money to a company that actually cares instead.
Well no, their call to action isn’t to not give anyone else money. They didn’t have anything negative to say about their competition like 1Password. They’re just warning you about the shady things Google and Apple are doing specifically. And as an alternative they’re offering their own solution instead, which also doesn’t cost any money.
Proton enabled passkeys in their free tier. So ultimately, yes by using their free tier and being safe in the thought that you can always leave if you want, that might drive you to pay for a paid plan.
But companies trying to earn your business by offering you a good honest product is not at all the same as a company using anti-consumer practices to keep you from leaving lol.
As someone who is not familiar with photon, I love to see a vendor presenting a feature with a technical discussion, even if they’re also selling it. As far as I can tell, no one was hiding intent, no one was directly selling, so “well done”. Or maybe I just agree with the premise, I dunno
As a fan of Proton services I don’t like “blog posts” from companies where the solution to a problem is just their product, regardless of who the company is
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If I can’t add your passkey to my Bitwarden vault, I’m not using your passkey.
Yeah or if they only offer 2FA via SMS. Like 1) it’s not even that much more secure and 2) it’s just more awkward.
But I also hate how Steam and Blizzard only allow you to verify logins in their mobile app. Fucking ridiculous.
If I can’t add your passkey to my local KeepassXC database, I am not using your passkey.
You can also host it yourself.
https://bitwarden.com/blog/host-your-own-open-source-password-manager/
Yea, I know. But my preference is for my password manager to not be cloud at all.
Bitwarden proper wants $40/year to have two users sharing passwords. You might try Vaultwarden?
That doesn’t seem unreasonable at all for not having to host your own server.
That’s with hosting your own server. Unfortunately I only discovered this paywall after sending them $10 out of good will.
Of course it’s open source, so it’s certainly possible to break their DRM, and if it were something less sensitive I would.
I still might, but VaultWarden looks like a better alternative.
Nowhere on their pricing page does it say you need to host your own server.
It seems no matter what new advancements we make in technology the big tech companies seek nothing more to implement it in a way that benefits themselves. Regardless if it means fucking over the consumer.
I really hate what the internet has become over the last couple of years.
That’s capitalism for you. They’re not interested in making things better, they’re interested in making more profit.
Is this an ad?
It’s a PSA with an ad at the end.
That was my observation as well. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…
I am not using passkeys until it’s possible to easily migrate them between providers (not just devices / browsers). If I used Proton Pass, and then later decided to use another password manager, could I export my passkey data?
We’ve also given passkeys and passwords equal priority so that you can use them interchangeably in our apps. This means you can store, share, and export passkeys just like you can with passwords.
That’s excellent. Thanks for pointing that out!
The next question is does anyone actually let you import passkeys? I don’t think there is ☹️
I have a few keys in Bitwarden but before I go adding more I am going to play with Proton Pass. A lot of users were understandably annoyed when Bitwarden released passkey support but in such a limited manner.
When vaultwarden supports this I’ll play ball. If I don’t have control over my authentication methods, then they aren’t my authentication methods.
Bitwarden does, not sure about the self-hosted version.
Still waiting for the mobile app. Maybe the firefox addon would work, but would prefer the app
Not surprised,
Google too nowadays.
There’s a reason why they removed their company motto “Don’t be Evil”
I thought they just removed the first word.
The way Apple or companies like Paypal implement two-factor authentication, let alone passkeys, drive me up the wall. This all could have been so much better.
I’m not even going to mention all the platforms that rolled out passkey creation support, but not passkey login support, for whichever damn reason
Yeah, Apple 2FA is infuriating, especially since you can do all factors from the same device. Kind of defeats the purpose of traditional 2FA/MFA. Also, companies that decide you 2FA experience has to use their app, instead of a standards-compliant TOTP app of your choosing…ugh.
Traditional 2FA (assuming you mean apps with codes) can be done from the same device (if you have the app with the codes installed on that device).
It doesn’t defeat the purpose of 2FA. The 2 factors are 1. The password and 2. You are in possession of a device with the 2FA codes. The website doesn’t know about the device until you enter the code.
Yeah my point is it does not protect the local device well. It does protect well from remote compromise though.
If you think forcing everyone to carry an object other than their phone around so they can use 2factor on their phone is a good idea… Or if you said I need to go to my laptop when I’m logging in on my phone and vise versa… that’s nonsense too. Sure maybe some companies require this. But that’s different.
Authy on my phone is just as “dumb” as Keychain on my phone.
How else are you imagining this should work? Keep in mind normal people need to do it too.
If I’m on my laptop, and the 2fa code shows on that same laptop, it defeats the purpose of it. The point is sortation of security privileges, ask this just adds more work while providing no less security to the device. It does protect you from remote compromise, though.
It doesn’t defeat the purpose of it, as you indicate, it can protect from remote attacks.
Also most or all of these should require some for of local authentication.
For example I have 2fa apps on my phone, where I need to use them, so yes, that’s less than ideal. However
- it protects against remote attacks
- it protects against SIM attacks
- and even if someone stole my phone and unlocked it, they’d still need my face id for every use
I bring my yubikey with me, it’s in my keychain. This is not only more secure against phone theft/access, which probably is not very relevant for most people, but it spreads the risk of locking yourself out.
For example, I was in Iceland with my girlfriend and she “lost” her phone. We wanted to locate it, so I logged to Google for her, which asked 2FA. If she used her phone, she would have been toast. Instead I made her use yubikeys too, and she just logged in and found her phone.
Obviously you can lose your hardware tokens too, but it’s generally less likely (you take out your home keys way less than your phone, for example). You can also backup your TOTP on multiple devices etc., of course.
For Apple, it’s your iCloud account that everything depends on, and it’s the weakest point. Not by itself maybe, but in practice there needs to be a way to reset your iCloud password, even without your phone. Currently I believe that’s just an Apple representative asking life questions, but that information is mostly publicly available. There needs to be a better way.
A physical 2fa device may be just what we need to securely rest our iCloud passwords, keeping everything else more secure
That’s a fair point. iCloud Keychain is a single point of failure.
The factors are:
- Something you have
- Something you are
- Something you know
Here the password is something you know and the device is something you have (typically also protected by something you are, like your fingerprint or face)
Someone with your phone but no password or fingerprint is SOL. Someone with your password but not your phone also SOL
PayPal for sure, because at one point they actually removed the ability to use a hardware mfa token.
A little known fact about iCloud is that you can use hardware MFA tokens. I think this feature was just recently released though. They force you to enroll at least two tokens too, which is a nice safety. I set this up about a month ago and it’s been great.
Lock downs are pretty much a hard pass for me. Anything I buy, I research, and if there’s even the slightest hint of BS incompatibility, it’s simply a no go.
Yeah I’ve avoided passkeys. Anything that Google is pushing to me is always in their interests.
People not getting phished is in their interests. That doesn’t mean it’s not in yours.
People getting their accounts compromised leads to spam email, spam comments, fake crypto livestreams, etc that impact others. Google definitely has an interest in preventing people from getting their accounts compromised and not just for the benefit of the individuals with the accounts but their platforms as a whole.
A lot of my hesitation is that not only are passkeys being pushed by the big vendors AND they seem to have a less than portable implementation BUT ALSO they don’t seem to give enough details. Everything is dumbed down for the less technical until it means nothing
I like that this thread already has more actual information than all the outreach of the big vendors over months
Google pushed email accounts to you, do you not have an email address either?
Email was already ubiquitous and generally standardized by the time Gmail released in 2004.
Asymmetric cryptography has been ubiquitous and generally standardized by the time Google began letting you store Passkeys, so what’s your point?
Is Google supporting a particular service or system a dealbreaker for you or not? Because Google has far more fingers in the public operation of email than it does passkeys. So if you’re still ok with having an email account, then you should be just as ok with using passkeys.
I’m not locked into Gmail: I know it implements standards and I choose it as long as it is most convenient.
A lot of what comes into my gmail account is actually addressed to various aliases from various providers, and I can point those aliases anywhere
In particular, all my recent online accounts use unique generated email addresses that I can disable at will, and that forward to my actual email
Well that’s great news, then you’ll like passkeys because you can use them without being locked into anything.
I noticed that recently every post on Proton’s blog has been an advertisement of their services.
They are hypocrites.
A few days ago they posted that corporations are bad because they collect fingerprints, profile users, etc., yet they are no better, as their mobile apps rely on Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) owned by Google to deliver notifications to their users.
In 2020 they wrote that they “may offer alternative push notification system”, but apparently shitting on corporations is easier than making actual changes. Four years ago.
Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?
Basically hardware keys (like YubiKey) without hardware
So…. Software keys…
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From my understanding it’s the concept of trust. Basic passwords are complete trust that both ends are who they say they are, on a device that is trusted, and passing the password over the wire is sufficient and nobody else tries to violate that trust. Different types of techniques over time have been designed to reduce that level of trust and at a fundamental level, passkeys are zero trust. This means you don’t even trust your own device (except during the initial setup) and the passkey you use can only be used on that particular device, by a particular user, with a particular provider, for a particular service, on their particular hardware…etc. If at any point trust is broken, authentication fails.
Remember, this is ELI5, the whole thing is more complex. It’s all about trust. HOW this is done and what to do when it fails is way beyond EIL5. Again, this is from my own understanding, and the analogy of hardware passwords isn’t too far off.
I guess it’s a bit like a bank card with a PIN. You go to pay for something and your card stores your credentials on it. To allow those credentials to be read you need to unlock them using the PIN.
Any example of websites where I can try passkeys? I have both bitwarden and Proton pass to test out
Test site: https://webauthn.io/
Known sites: https://passkeys.directory/
I personally like the demo at https://www.passkeys.io/.
what are passkeys? like biometrics fngerprints or facisl recognition you mean?
Passkeys are a way of doing public/private key-pair crypto to prove that you are in possession of the private key that corresponds to the public key that was registered with a site or service when you added the passkey to the account. The use of the passkey is often protected by biometrics like the fingerprint or facial recognition systems on your device but it doesn’t necessarily need to use biometrics at all if you don’t want to and you can instead use a passcode to unlock your device or password/passkey manager.
Basically instead of the normal way with passwords:
- You —password—> website
- Website verifies password matches, either directly to an actual stored password (bad) or through a hash they have stored
With passkeys you have:
- You <—challenge— website
- You sign the challenge with a private key that only you have
- You —signed challenge —> website
- Website verifies that the signed challenge corresponds to the public key you provided when you set up the passkey
In the password scenario, the website could be following best practices and hashing the password or it could just be storing them directly and insecurely. You have no idea what really goes on inside their systems. This also means that due to reused passwords, a security breach at one site can mean problems for other sites, even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
In the passkey scenario, you’re not sending anything particularly sensitive to each site so it’s more secure.
If I use a password manager with long random passwords, and use 2FAS to generate those 6-digit two factor authentication codes whenever possible (as opposed to SMS/email 2FA), is there any advantage?
Is it just that you don’t actually have to type anything, just press “I approve” on your phone after entering your username?
Or is it more just designed to improve security for people like my family members who use the same ~10 digit passwords for everything?
It’s definitely trying to be user friendly enough that non-technical users like the family members you mention can use it to replace passwords. For your use case with a strong password and 2FAS to generate a code, it still gets rid of the phishing potential. The main advantage for the other people like your family is that they don’t have to type or autofill anything, just select an account to log into or click approve on their phone. A main advantage for the service is that the user’s diligence is taken out of the equation for a lot of it and they don’t have to worry about a user giving their password and 2FA codes to a phisher. If a user tries to use a passkey at the wrong site (like a phishing site), it won’t pop up as an option to select because the domain is wrong.
Passkeys can also help anyone who is using a service in an indirect way. The 23andMe “breach” was due to stolen credentials from other actually breached sites being used to log into accounts that have data shared with them. That 23andMe data was shared to those compromised users by people who may have actually had all their security turned up to the highest settings like 2FA but was nonetheless scraped and obtained by the bad actors anyways. If 23andMe had been using passkeys (or even magic login links in an email), there would have been no credentials from other sources to use against their 23andMe’s users. Moving everyone to more secure authentication methods is in the best interest of everyone involved, it’s just that typically it was a hassle to have to setup an authenticator app or a password manager for 2FA. Passkeys, when everything is working properly, finally provide both more security and more convenience for the average person than just a password and so people might actually adopt them.
No, it’s like a security certificate to authenticate. It’s a secret that your key vault presents to the site to validate that you’re who you say you are.
like an encryption key? or cookies? I’ll try to look up how they work
They’re the private half of a public/private key pair, much like how you make encrypted connections to websites.
The gist of passkeys are that the secret you’re using to login to your accounts is stored on your device (Or in your password manager) and is never sent to or stored on the server. So if a website you have an account on is breached, unlike with a password, your passkey can’t be stolen, because they don’t have it.
Similarly, your passkey can’t be phished. If a malicious actor directed you to a fake login page and you didn’t notice and entered your password into the fake login form, they now have stolen your password. But because your passkey is not sent to the server like a password, the fake login page wouldn’t get anything.
And because your passkey isn’t something you have to remember, you can’t create an insecure one like with a password, and you can’t reuse the same one for different accounts.
I can wrap my head around the secret being stored in your device, but what happens when you go to a different device?
Let’s say for example, I am at my friend’s house, and for one reason or another, I don’t have my phone. My Gmail account is passkey locked, but I need to check my email from my friend’s laptop. Would that require that I install passkey on their laptop, and log in to my passkey account? Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account? If that’s the case, what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey? What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
I am all for more security and less password remembering, but I hop around a lot of computers.
Let’s say for example, I am at my friend’s house, and for one reason or another, I don’t have my phone.
If you need to log into your friend’s laptop to check your email, you would need your phone or some other passkey you had set up for your account, yes, as long as that was the only login method you have setup on your account. If you don’t have your phone, you might not be able to pass the two-factor steps or account login location checks many accounts. If Google finds the new login attempt suspicious for some reason, it will ask for additional checks like a code sent to your email or through a text and you may not be able to log in with just the password anyways. Just because you have the right username and password, it doesn’t mean that a service may let you log in without access to some kind of other trusted information accessible on an existing device.
Overall though, think of it like forgetting your physical keys.
Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account?
Yes, the same as if you had left your physical keys there and those keys provided access to all your accounts. There may be some technical protections like the timeout until it locks on a password manager but that’s up to the password/passkey manager app to implement and for the OS to guarantee the security of. It’s no different from loading up your password manager on the device. If you don’t trust the device or the owner of the device, you should not access your password/passkey manager on it.
what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
The same thing that happens if your password manager is compromised: you secure it (rotate encryption, create a new database, however you want) and then you set about updating new passwords and passkeys for your accounts. That’s why it’s recommended to only have your actual password/passkey manager on something you trust (your phone, your computer, etc) and use that device as the passkey for whichever other device your logging into rather than loading up your password/passkey manager on each device you’re logging into.
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey?
It’s a form of WebAuthn credential most likely, yes. Passkeys aren’t actually entirely new in how they can be used with accounts, the standards have been there for a while now. It’s mainly just a unified marketing from the big players as well as developing an ecosystem around it the standard such as the protocols for using a phone via Bluetooth as a passkey on a desktop/laptop to log in and other things like syncing the passkeys between devices using their existing password manager services for user convenience (so that the average person can actually use them). Under the hood it’s still WebAuthn for the actual authentication. Hardware security keys that connect via USB, Bluetooth, or NFC have been around for a while but have usually operated in nonresident key mode where they’ve been used for second factor authentication. Nonresident key mode has the advantage of storing the private key in an encrypted format with the website or service your logging into, meaning that the actual hardware key doesn’t need to have any storage capacity and can work with an infinite number of sites. This has the disadvantage that you have to provide a username (and typically a first factor like a password) to lookup which keys should be used (ie the ones associated with a specific account). That is probably how your friend logged in with a USB dongle. WebAuthn credentials that operate in resident key mode like passkeys do on the other hand store both the information related to identity and authentication, meaning that all you have to do is select the account you want to log into. This requires that they are stored on a trusted device like a phone, a laptop, or a hardware security key dongle that has storage.
What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
Again, the same thing that happens when you forget your physical keys for your car or home. You can’t access the thing protected by them until you go get them. The alternative is to bypass the normal authentication workflow and work around it, such as with an account recovery process (similar to getting a locksmith to get back into your car or home).
I am all for more security and less password remembering, but I hop around a lot of computers.
Then you’d probably like being able to log in by just unlocking your phone and confirming things, rather than having to go through a password lookup and one time code entering process each time.
Cool, thanks for the info. This is something I have wanted to setup for a little while now, I just didn’t understand all of the nuances.
account is passkey locked, but I need to check my email from my friend’s laptop. Would that require that I install passkey on their laptop
Yes but you would not want to do that. I can’t imagine a scenario where you could make it to your friends house without your phone, and also need to check your email so bad that you borrow their laptop, but in that case you would not be able to log in. Unless your passkey for that service is stored in your password manager, in which case you’d have to log in to that first.
Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account?
There is no “Passkey account”, it’s not a service or an app. It’s a file stored either on your device or in your password manager.
what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
I already brought up that you have no “passkey account” to compromise, but if your passkey was somehow stolen, the only thing compromised would be the service that passkey is for.
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey?
You can get hardware devices to store passkeys on, yes.
What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
If it’s lost or stolen you’d want to make new passkeys yes. If you forgot it at home, you wouldn’t be able to log in if the hardware device was the only thing you had a passkey stored on.
I wonder how often you truly forget important every day articles at home, despite you needing to get connected to things at a moments notice. I don’t think I’ve forgotten my phone anywhere once in the last 15 years.
The thing is, all these scenarios you’re coming up with are no different for passkeys than they are for complex, unique, secure passwords. It sounds like your usual MO is being able to recall your password (In the case you’ve forgotten your phone and are in a borrowed device), which means your passwords likely aren’t secure, and you’re probably reusing them, which is more of a “single point of failure” than passkeys ever could be.
Honestly, my advice to you is before you even start considering passwords vs passkeys, you need to fix yourself up man. You need to get your shit together a lil bit.
Exactly like an encryption key. Here’s a video from Security Now with Steve Gibson (a well known security researcher) who explained it in a fairly approachable fashion. That link should start at the beginning of that segment, about 1:31:00 in.
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