FIDO Alliance publishes new spec to let users move passkeys across providers

Something that is not clear to me about passkeys and makes me uneasy to start using them:

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?

> Are passkeys replacing passwords, 2FA, or both?

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.

I don't see how passkeys do anything to prevent phishing.

Two main ways: first, as I said in my original comment, you don't reveal the key when you use a passkey. So at worst a phisher might be able to get you to sign a challenge that they are facing to get into your account once, but they would not be able to re-use your credentials to get in again or to get into another site. And second, in a proper implementation you would have a separate key for every site you want to authenticate to, so a phisher would not have to merely phish you, they would have to mount an MITM attack on an HTTPS session (or find some other way to impersonate the site they are trying to phish your credentials for). That's not impossible, but it's orders of magnitude harder than impersonating a site through a typosquatting attack.

So, it really doesn’t prevent phishing. If you can get someone to give you their password, you can probably get them to click approve. The real benefit is to the service provider, not having to worry about leaking a secret if they get compromised.