Passkeys are built on the FIDO2 standard (CTAP2 + WebAuthn standards). They remove the shared secret, stop phishing at the source, and make credential-stuffing useless.
But adoption is still low, and interoperability between Apple, Google, and Microsoft isn’t seamless.
I broke down how passkeys work, their strengths, and what’s still missing
While the lock-in issue is annoying and a good reason not to adopt these, the device failure issue is a tech killer. Especially when I can use a password manager. This means I can remember two passwords (email and password manager), make them secure, and then always recover all my accounts.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction and I believe the only reason they are being pushed is because security people think they are cool and tech companies would be delighted to lock you into their system.
This is the only accurate take in the whole thread.
Passkeys solve “well, can’t be fished” by introducing 2 new problems and never resolving super prevalent session hijacking. Even as a basic cost-benefit analysis, it’s a net loss to literally everyone.
I think they are being pushed because cool technology on paper. Whenever I read an article about them, I can’t help but think about the human factors. How are passkeys created, often by a password or email. okay… that looks a lot like a password. Oh you lost the passkey, here lets send you one again. It stinks of a second factor without a first. Sure, the passkey itself is hard to compromise, but how about its creation. If your email is compromised I see no difference from passwords or passkeys.
They don’t email you a passkey, what are you even talking about?
The flow I hear about when people talk about passkeys is sign up with email. Code gets sent to email. Code is entered, passkey gets generated. There always seems to be some similar step that looks like that, and often you have new device or reset that looks the same. Sure the passkey itself is secure, but how do you get it, how do you generate it, how do you validate the first time?
None of that is remotely true lol. You don’t get a passkey, you generate. Nothing is “sent” to you at any point in time, it has nothing to do with email.
Instead of saying how it doesn’t work, it’d be more constructive to explain how it does.
Seems a little redundant when the article we’re all commenting on does precisely that.
You mean like… the article you’re commenting on does?
You can store Passkeys in open source password managers.
I don’t know most of my passwords, so the step to passkeys doesn’t feel like a big one. I also really like the flow of pressing Login; Bitwarden pops up a prompt without me initiating it; I press confirm. Done, logged in, and arguably more secure due to the surrounding phishing and shared secrets benefits.
Sure, they probably work great when you have your *passkey manager on the device, but that’s not when I need to have backup routes into my accounts. When using a new device, or someone else’s, having even a complicated password that can be typed or copied-pasted has way more functionality.
As far a I can tell, using passkeys would only risk locking me out of my accounts. Everyone else is already effectively locked out.
I can access my password manager via the browser from any device.
You could also use dedicated hardware to store your keys. Any FIDO USB key will do. I have a Yubikey that cost me less than 30 bucks.
It’s really handy, because I frequently use someone else’s device for work. All I have to do is plug it in, press the button on the key and enter the master password for the passkey storage. It’s like having a password manager on a USB stick.
Can’t you access your password manager from a web browser? Or your phone?
Oops, meant passkey manager, fixed it.
Isn’t that the same thing? All my credentials & passkeys are in the cross-platform password manager available from all my devices & any web browser. Passkeys even have a cross-device flow, so we can just scan a QR code & use a phone to sign into anything.
Manually keying in a password just feels so boomer.
I was never prompted to do such a thing. It always just told me to plug in my phone (and even that didn’t work).
Yeah the moods in this thread, like
“[I don’t understand this]!”
“[I don’t trust this]!”
“[It doesn’t fix everything]!”
“[This doesn’t benefit me]!”
“[What’s wrong with old way]!?”
And like, all valid feelings… just the reactions are a bit… intense? Especially considering it’s a beta stage auth option that amounts to a fancy version of the old sec key industry standard, not the mark of the beast.
Password managers store passkeys. They’re portable and not device-locked. Been using them on Bitwarden for like 2 years now.
Cops also love them because they make getting access to your entire phone including all accounts simple as cake if you use fingerprint/faceID to unlock your device.
deleted by creator
You can transfer passkeys between platforms? This is a non-issue
.
I came to sorta say this. Regardless of the system if it can fail and if people have to recover an account then phishing will always be a thing. In person options to deal with an account like with bank branches or government offices are the only true way of making things more secure. I sometimes think it would make sense for this. One rare thing I have seen that gives me a bit of hope is the use of in person at the post office for us government accounts. Thats exactly how it should be done. Secretary of state for state and usps for federal. They are the only agencies with enough physical locations.
Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction
Question is by what? I could see an argument that it is an overcomplication of some ill-defined application of x509 certificates or ssh user keys, but roughly they all are comparable fundamental technologies.
The biggest gripe to me is that they are too fussy about when they are allowed and how they are stored rather than leaving it up to the user. You want to use a passkey to a site that you manually trusted? Tough, not allowed. You want to use against an IP address, even if that IP address has a valid certificate? Tough, not allowed.
They were surpassed by password managers and 2fa.
Technically they are the 2fa. The second factor is something you have. I store all my passkeys in my password manager too, so I’m not faulting you, but technically that’s just undoing the second factor, because now my two factors are “two things that are both unlocked by the same one thing I know”. Which is one complicated factor spread across two form fields.
Password managers are a workaround, and broadly speaking the general system is still weak because password managers have relatively low adoption and plenty of people are walking around with poorly managed credentials. Also doesn’t do anything to mitigate a phishing attack, should the user get fooled they will leak a password they care about.
2FA is broad, but I’m wagering you specifically mean TOTP, numbers that change based on a shared secret. Problems there are: -Transcribing the code is a pain -Password managers mitigate that, but the most commonly ‘default’ password managers (e.g. built into the browser) do nothing for them -Still susceptible to phishing, albeit on a shorter time scale
Pub/priv key based tech is the right approach, but passkey does wrap it up with some obnoxious stuff.
I use them with bitwarden and a self hosted vaultwarden. If my phone breaks, no issue. If my server breaks, I got local backups… Keys are stored encrypted in a postgres database for which I have access, if I need to restore it. No lock-in issue or risk of loosing access when one or two devices break.
I’ve found a pretty good use for a passkey. Docusign. About every 3 months I need to docusign something at work. The process involves logging in, changing your password, logging in again, opening the document, logging in to sign, logging in to finish. The only steps you get to skip if there’s more than one document is the initial log on, and changing password. So with a passkey I just touch it a bunch of times and there’s no password change.
Sounds like a password manager would make that way easier. Changing your password would involve a few extra clicks. Also, you might want to check with your IT folks. Asking people to constantly change their password is a good way to weaken password strength. I don’t use docusign, but there is probably a setting that they can change.
Oh, I agree, but I have to argue enough with professionals who know better as it is. I have to do it every day with recent PhDs as a BA who’s been doing the job for 15 years. At this point it’s not my problem if something happens. I have other things that affect me every day to fight about. I’ll just continue cycling through my no repeats after 10 changes, 12 character passwords and using my yubikey for docusign for my own sanity.
sounds like a better solution is don’t use docusign
K, I’ll go tell the CEO that they need to come up with something different.
There’s like a million other free/libre digital document signing platforms out there. Try one that doesn’t suck.
Unfortunately, per the comment you replied to, that isnt under my control.
Even if you are really careful, your details can always be leaked from a company server during a breach. If the companies adopt passkeys, that issue isn’t there. Because there isn’t a password anyone can randomly use. That’s why I feel big tech companies are moving towards it.
The biggest disadvantage:
Disadvantages of Passkeys
Ecosystem Lock-In – Passkey pairs are synced through each vendor’s respective clouds via end-to-end encryption to facilitate seamless access multiple devices.
More eggs in the American megacorp basket for more people, yay
Currently I use a FOSS (I think?) password manager, BitWarden, that supports passkeys. I use it across Mac, Windows and Android so I’m while my passkeys are locked yo the password manager, I am not locked to any of the aforementioned megacorps.
While I use and love bitwarden, it’s not exactly foss. Although there is a foss implementation of their server backend
Vaultwarden (the free server implementation) also supports passkeys.
A cursory search lead to this thread from 2024 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/concerns-over-bitwarden-moving-away-from-open-source-what-does-our-future-hold/74800
where an employee stated
I’ll note that policy wise nothing changed. The referenced issue is a packaging bug, but the goal still is the dual licensing model, with the core being open source, and some (mostly enterprise) features being source-available.
Both the client and server are mostly open source. Some server features are paywalled. The alternative Vaultwarden server is fully open source, and much lighter on system resources.
Have there been any recent licensing shenanigans with BitWarden?
KeePassXC has begun rollout of their own implementation, and I’m pretty sure they’re considered FOSS.
From a quick scan of the white paper, it appears they’re currently using on-device passkey discovery and otherwise “intercepting” passkey registration workflows, which I take to mean they aren’t originating the request as a passkey registrar. This may be the easiest method to satisfy FIDO’s dID requirements.
I use BitWarden too. OS , device and browser agnostic is a win
But I imagine the vast amount of people will use whatever their platform is pushing, so Apple Google or Microsoft. And in 5 years time “3rd party passkeys” are not “secure enough” and blocked by the OS. (Ok that’s a bit tinfoil hat, but Google’s recent Android app developer verification scheme is fresh in mind)
This is a big one. Lock-in and the threat of provider blacklisting means it will remain a shortcut like SSO (“sign in with ____”) until we’ve established federated providers.On further reading, this may not be as far off as I thought. Passkey registration providers can be OS-level but browser and password manager based solutions were intended (overview from FIDO alliance). And it looks like KeePassXC has begun rollout of their own. If I’m reading correctly they currently “piggyback” off of an OS-based provider in various ways, so it’s not yet an end-to-end implementation, but these are early days.
That’s not the biggest disadvantage “if used properly.” Any account you have should get a passkey on every device you own. Each device has it’s own passkey system. If you have an iPhone, yeah, you get an apple passkey, but then if you have a windows laptop, you have a microsoft passkey, a FLOSS system will have it’s own, and so on. You are already on whatever system would contain the passkey and can easily add different ones each time you get a new device.
The biggest issue is that most people use a small number of devices (including many who use 1). Passkeys work best if you have many devices, so if you lose one, you just use another to access your services. If you have 1, you need to use recovery codes (and people don’t save them).
A key for each service for each device is too impractical in real life.
Getting a new device would mean logging in to hundreds of services to link up the new device. Or somehow keep track of which services have keys with which devices. And signing up to a new service would mean having to remember to generate keys for a a handfull of devices, some of which might not be available at the time (like a desktop computer at home when you are out). Or you risk getting logged out if you loose the one device that had a key for that particular service.
I agree passkeys can make sense with something like BitWarden or KeyPassX. Something that is FOSS, and is OS and device agnostic, and let’s you sync keys across devices. And should have independent backups too. Sync is not backup.
Your password hashes (assuming they even hash them) already live on their servers…
Cool, they know the hash to that one service I signed up with them. Not every account ever.
Your passkeys aren’t synced to anything, so the passkey is no different than your password hash. They’re device locked unless you use something like bitwarden, so you’re no more dependent on American mega corps than you are right this second.I’m wrong.
Dont they all sync to the respective cloud services?
iOS vault -> synced apple cloud Android vault -> synced with Google cloud?
Windows Hello -> synced with Microsoft account?And if they’re not synced, that’s even worse. Loose your device and loose your account. Or keep track of which of your 5 devices are have keys for which of your 150 accounts
Well shit, you’re right. I must not have been paying attention when they updated them to include that
Say you don’t understand passkeys without saying you don’t understand them…
A passkey uses public key cryptography to secure your account instead of a password, it only grants you access to the one account you set it up for, and the account provider only holds your public key, you control the private key. Your passkey is a secure alternative to passwords because you CANNOT reuse it across services, cannot reasonably remember it, and the method of using it isn’t by copying and pasting into a field like a password, so it isn’t susceptible to the same attacks.
If the provider loses your public key, they can’t give you a challenge to verify you have the private key, so you lose access. Just like if they lose your password hash. It’s an identical scenario.
The assumption is that the native passkey manager on the device (iPhone, android, windows) would sync the passkeys (to Apple , Google, Microsoft) for protection against device failure and easy of use across devices. Or you risk loosing your accounts if you loose your device.
That would happen if you store your passwords there too…
If you’re proactive enough with your passwords to manually store them in your own vault, you can be proactive enough to not use the corporate vaults that don’t allow exporting. This isn’t a “downside” of passkeys, it’s a downside of using the built in managers.
Better title:
Passkeys: still trying to explain why it’s worth the hassle when it isn’t
There’s a hassle?
Every time I was prompted to use one by plugging my phone in to my computer nothing happened. That was a little over a year ago.
It’s been a very seamless experience with Bitwarden. Pretty much “click passkey, now logged in”.
A better, well defined API for password managers to insert login information to the site compared to text boxes.
You missed some disadvantages. For example the UX and complexity are terrible.
The passkey options I’ve come across so far are as close to push-button as I can imagine.
Do you mean from the developer perspective, like the complexity of the API/workflow?
Perhaps he means the process of setting it up. Or when it doesn’t work. Or when passkeys are lost. Or using another device. A lot of people’s complaints about passkeys aren’t really about when it works.
It’s valid I think, but also some people forget passwords can have similar experiences. For one, there seems to be this idea that if you lose your passkey you get locked out of your account forever. The recovery process should be no different than losing your password.
They’re device-bound certificate based authentication with some shiny bits.
Or they’re portable-via-certain-services certificate based authentication with some shiny bits.
Either way they’re new and try explaining that the user needs a new one for every device (or needs a new app to carry them around in) and that if the device dies, or the app dies, they lose it all. I have quite a few people in my life who can’t wrap their heads around using a password manager.
Personally, I find them irritating. My chosen password manager on iPhone doesn’t support them, so I need to have the iOS password vault turned on (yes, this is a dark pattern Apple has created to try to increase adoption of their password vault) to use them. Adoption needs to be much higher, interoperability needs to be better, and they need to put back the hint for which vault to use (which was removed early on to keep Microsoft and google from forcing chrome/edge vaults, but has the actual effect that chrome/edge tend to win the race over other options and means that the passkey prompt might be for a different app than the one that you prefer, leading to further user confusion)
I really don’t want to turn my devices into hardware keys. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to recover if, say, there was a fire or flood. Hardware breaks, gets lost, stolen. How about people who can’t afford multiple devices? What about the unhoused? How about if you get arrested and your one device gets confiscated- you can’t even give anyone else access to your data. What if you’re a good witness recording something and the police decide to make your device into evidence (or destroy it).
MFA? Absofuckinglutely. I’ll pass on passkeys, sorry.
Yeah this is my situation. My personal computer is really infrequently used and as such I’m already in a dangerous situation when it comes to sign-in risk detection kicking off and asking for further authn proofs. I’ve had my phone die (and come to life when its replacement arrived) and that was a harrowing situation because all the MFA is stored there. Passkeys seem to make it worse, unless I subscribe to a sync service, which I need to infallibly trust (and I’m iffy on that; 1Password has a good security model and all that but passkeys are a different level of trust).
Think of passkeys like they’re backups.
If you have one, you have none. If you have two, you have one. If you have three, at least one of them has to live offsite.
There are a ton of people who can’t reliably meet the “three” threshold, and plenty who can’t meet the two.
Good way of putting it. How many people have three devices they can use for storing passkeys? I don’t and I’m a nerd.
I do; or at least I can. But really, Device #2 should be in a fire safe, and Device #3 should be in a safe deposit box. These should be “set and forget” devices, not just “the laptop that I use and the phone that I use”. Those are additional costs, additional planning, additional effort, additional administration (because you need to also be checking that these cold devices still work on a scheduled basis), maybe additional required skill (depending on what you want these set and forget devices to be). You need to have an appropriate place to keep that fire safe. And when one of those cold devices doesn’t work anymore, you have to figure out why and likely replace it.
To do it right, you really have to have your shit together. That I don’t.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind if I could use my flipper for it, but the big issue is “if flipper break get fucked.” I can back up my .kdbx file in 14 luks encrypted locations, I can’t backup a whole ass flipper as easily.
Might I suggest Bitwarden.
It’s open source, syncs across every platform I know of, and supports passkeys.
Thanks. Will check it out.
Somehow PieFed is able to make them work but simultaneously many large companies are shifting to “magic links” sent to your email. 😡
Yep… It’s as secure as your email. Or they are just leveraging the passkeys on the emails.
I’m not really concerned about the security of it. Moreso the inconvenience of having to open my email client, specifically on the same device, and then sit there and click the refresh button over and over, waiting for it to come through, and then having to go back and delete it after so there’s not even more clutter in my inbox…
Refresh…Refresh…Refresh…
Send new link…
Message arrives…
‘This link is no longer valid’I’m not really concerned about the security of it. Moreso the inconvenience…
Honestly, convenience is security (change-my-mind lol) insofar as it measurably impacts rate of user adoption/adherence and thus outcomes.
It’s the annoyance you describe that leads most users to skip 2FA setup until it’s forced on them, for example.
convenience is security (change-my-mind lol)
Not at all. Typically they’re opposites. But I understand what you’re trying to say. More convenience leads to better security.
Or rather, making security convenient leads to adoption. Making it inconvenient leads to insecure workarounds.
Exactly
If it’s more convenient to be insecure than secure, users will pick insecure every time. There’s a reason there are so many bad password in the top passwords in breach dumps.
I have to tell myself every time I go through some of my login flows that inconvenience to me means more so to an attacker, but most people don’t have an adversarial mindset and just want it to work.
User inconvenience is not at all the same thing as security.
No, but the two tens to be correlated.
Example, MFA authentication is a security feature, but inconvenient as shit with low or no lifetime. Same complaints about short lived sessions on app sites. Especially when every login requires MFA…
Yeah you get it. It’s a “slow = fast” type of spiel, just a bone to pick with colleagues who embrace anti-user practices needlessly.
Don’t forget the intermediary
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Haha that’s the one ;)
No, thanks. I’ll keep using password+2FA and I hope that passkeys never become “mandatory”.
Thanks to our dystopian hellscape we live in it’ll become mandatory just like useless online ids. I hate having to explain passkeys to my family. Some fuckface suit who doesn’t use it properly pushed for a portfolio addition.
But what’s dystopian about passkeys? They are actually more secure than Password + TOTP. Phishing out a passkey is practically impossible.
If its not fully functional it feels more like a vendor lock in than anything actually useful. Use a Google device but want to change? Oh I’m sorry you have to do all this work first thanks to passkeys.
Some websites are better about it but they can also have support in-fighting over which service works better. Its the Password Manager scenario all over again but worse.
That’s why it’s important to avoid vendor lock-in and use actual reputable password managers to secure your passkeys such as Bitwarden, 1Password, or KeePass. On Android 14+ and iOS, you can even set your preferred password manager as the default passkey provider.
If you don’t fully trust Bitwarden servers, you can self-host a Vaultwarden instance, which is compatible with Bitwarden clients. Alternatively, using a yubikey is also a great hardware based option. Just because Google & Microsoft are heavily promoting passkeys doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad.
Passkeys work flawlessly for me across platforms:
- Android 14–15 (except on Brave with de-Googled devices)
- iOS 17–26 (and likely beyond)
- Windows 11
- Linux; while it doesn’t have OS-level integration yet, passkeys work perfectly in modern browsers
Personally, I use passkeys everywhere. I host my own Vaultwarden instance to store all my passkeys, and for redundancy, I also keep separate ones in my Keepass database, which I use for TOTPs. My self-hosted stack is secured by Authentik, running completely passwordless and uses passkeys for authentication and other apps integrate via OAuth and Proxy Auth.
I still don’t quite understand the issue you mentioned with websites. Typically, the passkey mechanism is triggered directly by the browser or OS (if you’re on mobile). You’ll be prompted to either save a new passkey or sign in with an existing one. If your password manager is correctly set up as the default credential provider, it should work seamlessly. Even without a browser extension, most Chromium-based browsers let you scan a QR code with another device that has your passkeys or you can simply insert a yubikey to authenticate.
What infuriates me is that some services like Amazon use passkeys only as second factor and asks for an OTP anyways which defeats the whole purpose. But for services that do it right, passkeys works seamless!
Yeah now try explaining all of that to tech illiterate family who don’t care beyond “I’ll just use Google Passkey” even if its the worst option.
I set my mother up on my Vaultwarden instance and she uses it just fine w/o needing to configure anything other than me setting it as the Default Passkey Provider.
Didn’t have to explain her anything other than telling her to scan her fingerprint when the prompt comes. 🤷🏻♂️
The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa
Personally, I found that It works well with Microsoft, Paypal, Google, Shopify and Proton. I was really surprised to find the option on German government sites, worked there as well. Tested in Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf. The only thing I find dissappointing is adoption
I’ve been resisting using them and decided to set one on my rarely-used and unimportant Piefed account to try it out.
Saved to Bitwarden fine on my desktop browser. When I try to log in with a browser on my phone, it asks for my username and does nothing more after that dialog closes. While I’m not sure if this is a problem with Piefed, Bitwarden, or Firefox, I’m now disinclined to try it with anything important, especially if that thing might then discourage me from logging in with a password.
I recognize the theoretical advantages, but passkeys don’t do much to solve problems I actually have. All my passwords look like
#vVukh9c$3Kw4Cs8NP9xgazEuJ3JWEand are unique. Bitwarden won’t autofill the wrong domain. I don’t enter credentials in links from emails I didn’t trigger myself immediately before. I haven’t checked whether I can reliably backup and restore them in my Bitwarden vault.I self host vaultwarden, and use bitwarden clients everywhere. Passkeys are stored there
Passkeys to me, are a better way to insert login information. Some developers don’t think of passwords getting automatically filled in, so this autofill sometimes breaks. Passkeys might be a improved interface to integrate password managers. Also, sometimes 2FA keys from my bitwarden client gets copied into the clipboard, which sometimes overwrites the stuff I wanted to preserve in there. This does not happen with passkeys.
This
I’m still annoyed that “OPAQUE” never seemed to catch on. Uses a username/password combo as normal, but never actually sends the password to the server, only a proof of knowledge. Even if the server is hacked and the DB leaked the attackers can’t actually recover anything resembling a password from it, since the server simply never possesses it.
Passkeys are superior (No password at all), if only the UX around them was better.
I’m still mad SQRL never got off the ground. It was smartphone based initially, though they quickly made it work in browser. You had a private key that was ‘you’ and it generated unique user assertion certs per domain, and you completed the login flow by scanning a QR code with the app, which pinged a URL with the user assertion. It was really cool since it had the option of working alongside a password, or you could set it to only work with SQRL logins. No password or anything for the login, just pure math and key material.
But given it put all recovery on the user (if you didn’t back up your shit, it’s fine if you lose it), I can’t say I’m that surprised.
I don’t understand how this is meaningfully different from passkeys?
The eco-system lock-in makes this a non-starter for me. If I could store the private keys in something like a keepass vault (or that) and do the authentication magic from that I would consider it.
You can? At least I do that. I host vaultwarden myself and store the passkeys there.
Passkeys to me are just a better way to autofill in login data.
Oh I’m stoopit. I just looked up the documentation for keepassxc and it supports it too:
https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_passkeys
So I guess the next time I create an account that supports it I’ll try it and see how it goes.
OK, now think how nontechnical people will not be able to do it. They will be tied to Google/X-corp for all credentials, even government ones. Waiting to be banned if their social credit is too low.
Nope.
Hardly anyone supports it: https://www.passkeys.io/who-supports-passkeys
So to use it I will have to log in with my google/microsoft account everywhere? Thanks but no thanks.
I’ve used it with many sites not on that list. Including this one. It’s not comprehensive.
No, you do not need Microsoft/Google account.
Okay, so long as a passkey is something I can memorise. Otherwise, it’s significantly worse than a regular password (assuming you use good passwords and don’t reuse passwords etc).
It seems like they want to tie it to a physical computer (like the one in your pocket), which sucks big time. What happens if I don’t have access to that computer at all times, or it breaks, or is lost?
I’m planning on getting rid of my smartphone for something that just does calls and texts for example, because I’m sick of how unhealthily reliant I, and everyone, have become on this thing, and I want to be more connected to the real world. What then?
My brain is the best place to store passkeys, it can’t be hacked, stolen, lost, etc, unlike every other option. It’s easily capable of storing lots of randomised unique passwords for each service (surely I’m not the only one that can do this?). It’s the clear winner.
How many good passwords can you memorize? I can maintain 2-3 in my head long term, especially if only used rarely, and you can be phished if you are typing it in. Not tenable for online accounts. The only real comparison with security parity is a password manager + 2fa generated on-device, compared with passkeys. In both cases, you have “strong” password, no re-use, resiliency to fishing, and requires both “something you know and something you have.” I think a password manager is slightly more usable, but I’m not convinced either is a “good” experience yet.
security parity is a password manager + 2fa generated on-device
This experience works perfectly for me. I have no need of whatever junk the latest consortium of megacorps has come up with.
🤷♂️
I store all my passkeys in bitwarden so they are available anywhere I have bitwarden. Which makes it tough if/when I need personal accounts at work (like to log into electric company to check outage map).
You just need to memorise the PIN at max. If your device has biometric recognition you could even use your face scan or fingerprint so even remembering a PIN is not needed in that case.
