A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactly a passkey is. There’s a good reason for that. A passkey is in some sense one of two (or three) different things, depending on how it’s stored.
  • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    1. Password managers are, generally speaking, far more security conscious than the average website. I’d rather send a password to my password manager a couple times a day than send passwords to every website I interact with.

    2. One click to confirm vs. 2-3 to autofill. Tiny gains in speed 🤷‍♀️ If you make a password manager even slightly more convenient than just using gregspassword123 for everything, you can onboard more normies.

    • Lem453@lemmy.ca
      0·
      1 year ago

      Most people that have password managers are already using different passwords for each website. Usually randomly generated. What’s the difference between that and a passkey?

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        The secret key pair of a passkey is never transmitted over the internet. Even if somebody snoops the authentication, they will not be able to reproduce the secret key to login in the future.

        Think of it just like SSH public and private keys.

        Normal passwords, are typically provided at login time, and get transmitted, relying on HTTPS to keep them secure, if somebody could observe the authentication, they could reproduce the password later.

        (Yes someone could hash the password client side and send over the output… But that’s extra work and not guaranteed)

        • towerful@programming.dev
          0·
          1 year ago

          Client side hashing of a password just makes the hashed result the password, as far as security is concerned.
          Unless there is some back-and-forth with the server providing a one-time-use salt or something to make each submission of the password unique and only valid once, at which point that might get snooped as well.
          Better off relying on client certificates if you are that concerned

          • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Passkey’s approach is actually relatively close to client side certificates. It’s just in a form that is compatible with using a password manager. From the user standpoint once everything supports it properly, logins become relatively transparent and man-in-the-middle is pretty effectively mitigated. The other upside is of course unless you’re hosting your own stuff, no one supports client side certificates. This is an opportunity for all the big players to actually push people into better security.