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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

Passkeys ought to be exactly like SSH keys. Unfortunately, they are not.

The attempts to restrict when and how they are stored, and how you can access them - those are going to cause a lot of pain and confusion.

I have all of my SSH keys stored in KeepassXC, which (imho) is a lot more secure than having them hang around in my .ssh directory. Open KeepassXC, and the keys are available. Close it, and they're gone. Synchronizing the KeepassXC-file across devices means that I have access to the keys on all of my devices.

The big companies pushing passkeys are trying very hard to prevent this kind of convenience.

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They shouldn't be exactly like SSH keys. With SSH keys, you can go and copy/paste your private keys on a scammer's website because they asked you nicely. People will totally do it as they don't understand what they're doing. The main thing with passkeys, and key dongles in general, is that you simply can't do that as the keys are inaccessible and you can only prove possession of a key when asked by a domain you've explicitly registered with (the proof-of-possession is never sent to any other domain than that which you registered with). What OP says is that opens the possibility for key providers to lock-in users, as that seems like an unavoidable side-effect of the legitimate goal of preventing phishing (phishing is the biggest security issue today, to increase security means making phishing impossible, so I still support passkeys as the best solution for that).

There's a big difference between "can't just hit the copy button and paste in the key" and "can't export the key as part of a backup." Physically preventing users from ever accessing their own keys is an absurd user-hostile proposition. Even more absurd when the they're software keys stored in a database the user can decrypt. The FIDO alliance is just ensuring that password managers will require 3rd party backup tools to be useful.

Password managers have prevented phishing just fine by binding passwords to particular domains, ssh keys prevent phishing with IdentitiesOnly and passkeys are bound in the same way as regular password managers.

Any security solution that involves lay people having access to keys is NOT secure. What you call "absurd user-hostile" is actually basic security in the real world with non-technical people.

Technical people can already be secure using appropriate protections, but even for them it's very difficult to do it properly.

Lay people will, without understanding what they're doing, ask the password manager to give them their password to enter manually on any phishing website as they'll think that it's not working because it's "broken". So , absolutely no, password managers do NOT prevent phishing.

If you think I am exaggerating, well, I work with this and I assure you it's even worse than that.

> ssh keys prevent phishing with IdentitiesOnly

There has been a pretty insane number of times I've asked someone for their SSH public key and I get a response of ---- BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY ----. From people employed in tech jobs. Now imagine someone who barely understands how to use a computer, they're an easy target to get their identity phished.

I don't think the answer to these problems building system that treats users the same as an attacker when it comes to accessing and backing up their own private keys. Because at the end of the day the ability to export your private keys and store them somewhere securely is the account recovery of last resort.

Passkeys aren't HSMs -- the fact that you can sync them via your iCloud or Google account should dispel any such nonsense. It's fine for Apple or Google to store your keys at your request and they should keep them secure but the model of "here's my key, now don't ever let me look at it but let me use it via what is effectively DRM" is silly.

If a warning message on export "Never share this with anyone. Even someone you trust. Even your IT department. There is no reason anyone but you should have access to this key." isn't enough to stop people giving it away then no security was ever going to work for them. They would give away the credentials that lets them use the key in its absence.

> Because at the end of the day the ability to export your private keys and store them somewhere securely is the account recovery of last resort.

Or just have multiple passkeys for the same account. It doesn't matter if I lose the passkeys on my laptop because I've got other passkeys to those accounts on several other devices.

> Passkeys aren't HSMs -- the fact that you can sync them via your iCloud or Google account should dispel any such nonsense

Resident keys practically are HSMs, aren't they? None of my passkeys are backed up to a Google or iCloud account.

> If a warning message on export "Never share this with anyone. Even someone you trust. Even your IT department. There is no reason anyone but you should have access to this key.

In those conversations with people who should be experts I usually made a point to tell them send me the public key and told them to never share the private. They still sent the public. People have been told to never share passwords either but I still often hear "yeah my password for this is blahblah123..." when asking for help.

I would say the exact opposite, traditional ssh key management should eventually give way to resident keys. Aka, treating them just like passkeys.

We've been storing ssh keys directly on our yubikeys since before passkeys were a thing.

Not only is it clearly more secure it's also been a usability lift. Plugin your yubikey, start an ssh agent, and run ssh-add -K to get all your resident keys added to your current session.

I might add, you can already do this. OpenSSH has had FIDO support for a while now. I've found it to work better than trying to use PGP or PIV/PKCS#11

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