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225 points Terretta | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.605s | source
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MarkMarine ◴[] No.41863214[source]
In one of the things that I do in my job, I run the auth system for a fintech, and passkeys are an incredible step forward for the typical user. Being able to migrate your passkeys between providers is a great step forward, I'm glad this is being implemented.

Lots of complaints about passkeys and "big tech paternalism" in the comments here, and frankly I don't think ya'll deal with the middle of the bell curve user base that much.

I've got users who, by literally no fault of their own, are being social engineered into reading back their SMS OTP codes to fake tech support. State of the art in industry is basically trying to understand every action that is happening on a device (via mobile phone network providers, location, their actions across multiple other sites, etc. etc. through vendors providing this type of intelligence... by vacuuming up all your data) to understand if fraud is happening by seeing if you can even trust the device that is getting the SMS. Every time we make a step forward in privacy, this gets harder and harder (fingerprinting devices is basically pointless now, so how do I tell if this should be a trusted device or not) so there is a driving force against improving user privacy coming from these vendors.

Passkeys are the first positive step in auth I've seen in a decade that the average user will pickup and use, it helps them login and helps them not try to set a weak password they shared with multiple sites, and they can't read it back to a scammer who is fake tech support.

Would I like passkeys to be more like ssh keys? um, maybe but I don't care about it one bit in practice. I use passkeys for everything I can and I've never once seen friction. The average user does not want to deal with backing up their passkeys or even thinking about them, heck most of them don't. If anyone in the comments doesn't like the implementation of webauthn, suggest changes to the spec and do the work to get it implemented instead of complaining about it in the comments.

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crote ◴[] No.41864267[source]
> If anyone in the comments doesn't like the implementation of webauthn, suggest changes to the spec

Rip out resident keys altogether. They aren't needed. You can get 99.9% of the benefits of Passkeys by using non-resident keys - literally the only drawback is that you'd need to enter a username.

Resident keys essentially kill physical tokens. Without resident keys a $10 token can support thousands of websites. With resident keys? A couple dozen, if you're lucky.

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1. comex ◴[] No.41866800[source]
> With resident keys? A couple dozen, if you're lucky.

Or, future tokens start bundling a bit of flash storage and make this a non-issue. Considering how cheap it is, that ought to be possible even for low-cost tokens.

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2. vaylian ◴[] No.41867350[source]
You still need to allocate physical space for 1) the cryptographic circuitry of the token 2) the tamperproof and stress-resistant enclosure. Depending on the form factor, you might not have that much physical space left for storage. The physical requirements for a token are much more complex than a plain USB drive.
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3. xescure ◴[] No.41883358[source]
Google’s security key can already support 250 resident keys. I’m not sure how secure it is compared to Yubikeys, but it can’t be that far behind.