Are passkeys replacing passwords, 2FA, or both?
What if I created a passkey on some device, lost that device, and my passkeys aren't cloud-backed-up? Would I be able to recover my account, or it's doomed? Or does it depend on how a given website implemented it?
They are advertised as a replacement for passwords, but the truth is that they are orthogonal to both passwords and 2FA. They are a completely different kind of authentication.
Both passwords and passkeys work by proving that you know a secret. The difference is that with a password, the way you prove that you know the secret is by revealing it, which leaves you open to phishing. The other problem with passwords is that the secret is generally one that you are expected to type and remember, which limits how long and random it can be.
With passkeys, the secret is a public key (EDIT: in the sense of public-key encryption. The secret is actually the secret part of a public-private keypair), that is, a long string of random bits that a normal human could not remember even if they wanted to, and the way you prove that you know it is using that key to produce a digital signature for a random challenge. You never reveal your key during normal operation, and that makes it more resistant against phishing.
> What if I created a passkey on some device, lost that device, and my passkeys aren't cloud-backed-up? Would I be able to recover my account, or it's doomed? Or does it depend on how a given website implemented it?
It depends on how a web site implements it, but keep in mind that everything that makes it easier to recover from a lost key also makes your account more vulnerable to attack. So having backups of your passkey keys is a really good idea. But those backups don't have to be in the cloud. You could keep local copies on your own devices, or even print the key on a sheet of paper and keep that in a safe.
Obviously this isn't bad advice, but it is the reason I won't be diving into passkeys any time soon. Firefox Sync (the original version) had this philosophy: it's perfectly secure but if you lose your key, you've lost your bookmarks, history, and anything else that gets synced. For non-power users this is a catastrophic failure mode. For power users this still happens and it sucks. I was at Mozilla during this time and the failure modes of Sync were impressively common, even among employees.
Nobody expects to lose their backup. If you were a victim of hurricane Helene, it's entirely likely your safe is gone and all of your devices are destroyed. If that also means you've permanently lost access to your files or email or whatever, that's really really bad. And completely within the realm of possibility!
Obviously you can't fix this with cryptography alone. But it shows that passkeys can't be implemented as a full solution.
WebAuthn credentials are bound to the issuing domain, so the user agent will not supply a passkey to a domain other than the one it should go to.
Based on my (limited) understanding from reading the page: 1. Server generates challenge, sends a challenge 2. User device signs the challenge by encrypting with its private key, returns the signature. 3. Server verifies the signature by decrypting with the public key.
As you mentioned, the private key (the only thing that can generate a valid signature) isn't leaked.
Yeah, I meant "public key" in the sense of "public-key cryptography". I've edited the comment to make this clearer. Thanks for pointing that out.
> Based on my (limited) understanding from reading the page: 1. Server generates challenge, sends a challenge 2. User device signs the challenge by encrypting with its private key, returns the signature. 3. Server verifies the signature by decrypting with the public key.
That is almost exactly right, but since we're being precise here, I would just pick on this one very minor nit:
> User device signs the challenge by encrypting with its private key
> Server verifies the signature by decrypting with the public key
"Signing/verification" and "encrypting/decrypting" are two completely different things. In RSA these are conflated, but it's important not to confuse them. With elliptic curves, these have nothing to do with each other. It's just a peculiarity of RSA that makes it encrypt/decrypt to do digital signatures.
Well, OK, but what is the alternative?
(Actually, you don't need to manually keep backups. You can have automatic backups, but those come with their own set of risks.)
It depends on the type of attack being mounted, but a typical phishing attack is mounted as a MITM attack. With passkeys, a MITM cannot get the client to even ask the user to approve the transaction because the attacker cannot authenticate as the relying party.
You can attack passkeys by, say, compromising the user's machine, but that's not phishing.
Banks aren't perfect but mine already has all my money and the deed to my house. I trust the safety of my bank more than I trust Google not to lock me out or all my hardware to be destroyed.