Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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"Passkeys" is a new brand name slapped on an older open, interoperable technology, so it's difficult for me to be "against passkeys" as they haven't fundamentally changed anything.

Before the branding they were known as FIDO2 "discoverable credentials" or "resident keys".

Two things have changed with the rebrand:

1. A lot of platforms are adopting support for FIDO2 resident keys. This is good actually.

2. A lot of large companies have set themselves up as providers of FIDO2 resident keys without export or migration mechanisms. This is the vendor lock-in part (no export feature), but it's not a feature of the underlying tech itself.

Fwiw FIDO are actively working on some standard for exporting/importing keys so that's something.

If you want to use passkeys without lockin, just use Bitwarden or KeepPassXC - they all have full support. Or you can also store a limited number of passkeys on your FIDO2-compatible hardware key like Yubikey or the open-source Nitrokeys.

Except the FIDO Alliance is trying to pressure KeepassXC to remove exporting passkeys in an open format: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

> trying to pressure KeepassXC to remove exporting passkeys in an open format

I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate representation of the request? At least from a quick skim the claimed issue is being able to export keys in plaintext. For example, from the issue author:

> I strongly recommend you temporarily disable this feature or at a minimum require file protection/encryption.

And later:

> > Besides, determined advanced users could just write code to decrypt the kdbx file and extract the passkeys anyway.

> That's fine. Let determined people do that, but don't make it easy for a user to be tricked into handing over all of their credentials in clear text.

> I don't quite understand why requiring file protection/encryption can't be a temporary minimum bar here.

To me that doesn't sound like they're requiring a proprietary format. Something like AES encrypted JSON sounds like it'd work as well, and that sounds pretty "open" to me?

> > That's fine. Let determined people do that, but don't make it easy for a user to be tricked into handing over all of their credentials in clear text.

Has there even, ever, been an instance of that happening?

There have been literally thousands of documented incidents of this.

There's an entire subsection of the security industry dedicated to this happening. The DefCon international security conference holds an on-stage competition where security researchers demonstrate this happening to real targets in real time in front of a live audience.

> There have been literally thousands of documented incidents of this.

Of making people export all their credentials from a password manager and send them to a scammer?

That threat has no teeth; anyone requiring attestation these days will cut out Apple users, because Apple will not implement it (for consumer use cases). If they don't block Apple passkeys, then KeePass can send Apple's AAGUID and the game is over.

I've complained about this GH exchange in the past and have come to understand that Apple is also part of the alliance, and the entire concept of blocking software-only password managers is just dead outside of enterprise situations where they mandate the hardware/software anyway. Mr. Cappalli might disagree, but he and his employer do not have the power to change this without breaking the standard and throwing away over a decade of work.

FIDO can't force any app developers to do anything but fwiw I think "pressuring" people to encrypt secrets at rest rather than storing them in plaintext is ok.

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There's levels to appropriate paranoia around these things of course. SSH private keys are stored in plaintext for millions of engineers around the world - sometimes probably even passed around through unsecured emails or whatnot I would guess. They're still largely more secure than user:pass on aggregate, despite that rather major peril.

So ultimately, plaintext creds are not necessarily catastrophic. But still - imo - something worth concerted effort to dissuade at least at early stages of standards' implementation.

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Edit: also, looks like the outcome of that thread was ultimately that KeepassXC have opted to implement the spec as per[0]. Good outcome to a good request.

[0] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/11363

By the way, notice Yubikey did not really release any new series/models and jacked up their price in just a few years. About 50% in 4 years.

The large adoption of those devices and standards did not lower the price.

They probably just banked on the enterprise market where every CISO was pressured to tick the hardware/2FA checkbox. And is then gonna allow to use the Microsoft/Google "software" one because it is hard to manage otherwise.

I think there's a bunch of factors to why yubi have upped their prices - not least, waiting for competition in their form factor & not seeing any emerge (token2 & nitrokey are much bulkier) probably gave them some confidence in the uniqueness of their product offering.

It's also become a much more niche product as software based (and/or primary-device-hardware-based) solutions have evolved & improved. & niche costs more.

All that said I'm really not sure why they've been so quiet on new series releases.

> I think there's a bunch of factors to why yubi have upped their prices - not least, waiting for competition in their form factor & not seeing any emerge (token2 & nitrokey are much bulkier)

It is true about the size.

Sill I do not understand the price difference between 5C Nano [0] and the PIN+ Mini-C [1]. 3 to 4 times more expensive depending on the currency.

- [0] https://www.yubico.com/pt/product/yubikey-5-series/yubikey-5...

- [1] https://www.token2.com/shop/product/pin-mini-c-release3-1-fi...

Passkeys would be wonderful if they removed remote attestation. Remote attestation is still there, so I will not touch it.

Passkeys would be better without remote attestation, no doubt. But remote attestation is not only optional but also, passkeys are not a prerequisite for requiring remote attestation.

Lots of services that don't support passkeys currently require remote attestation. Boycotting passkeys (an open, possibly beneficial tech that doesn't require remote attestation) will not prevent bad actors from requiring remote attestation (with or without passkeys).

Agreed. Boycotting them is necessary but insufficient.

No, boycotting them is entirely orthogonal to the issue. Passkeys have no role in ensuring that we do or don't rely on remote attestation - they're two totally separate considerations.

Passkeys have many benefits over current alternatives for auth, & the inclusion of remote attestation doesn't make them worse than current auth because all current auth can be coupled to remote attestation.

Continue to oppose remote attestation but do use Passkeys. They're a massive improvement.

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