127
Passkeys are not a trap. Use them!
(hachyderm.io)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
127 points (75.1% liked)
Privacy
51431 readers
669 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
The web wasn't supposed to be controlled by corps either, and look where we are now.
If passkeys were to follow the same path as the web, here's what it would look like. Corporate passkeys get the most users because of OS integration and convenience. Now that they have all the users they can commandeer the standards, and make them so complex and evolve so quickly that non-corporate implementations can't keep up (think Firefox vs Chrome). Corporations convince websites to drop support for outdated passkeys, citing security issues. Non-corporate implementations are locked out. Monopoly is established.
And now that passkeys are centralized to corps, the government can exert power on them, mandating hardware attestation for things like hardware-backed id and age verification. They push for backdoors, so they can log into anybody's account. Bye bye privacy.
Question: Why did these corps implement TOTP? You should be able to answer this from an economic perspective of them trying to save money.
Another question: why aren't these corporations locking down TOTP to restrict them to their own validator apps, in the same way you're proposing that they might do for passkeys?
But they do. There are TOTP implementations that have been intentionally modified to prevent using standard apps. I don't remember other examples right now, but I think Steam Guard is one.
I'm sure a lot of people (like myself) would refuse to install a special custom TOTP app just to be able to use one site. They're only hurting TOTP adoption by doing that, and thus increasing the amount of support resources they need to allocate to account hacking / hijacking.
I'm sure there are other companies too willing to go against their economic interests for various reasons, but they're going to be in the minority.
To reduce support load from people getting their accounts hacked and asking support to get them re-instated. I don't doubt that these incentives also drive the push for passkeys, but passkeys are much more opaque and tightly integrated with the OS, and is thus more vulnerable to centralization.
They are. Authy is the biggest offender I know.
Edit: some info about how Authy locks you in: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/switching-to-aegis-for-totp-codes.html. Note that some websites integrate directly with Authy and force you to use Authy to set up the TOTP. The only way out is to use a rooted phone to transfer the codes to another app like Aegis.
I'm not sure what you mean by integrated into the OS. I use a FOSS password manager on android (keepassdx), storing passkeys both for apps and websites. When the browser or an app asks for a passkey, android uses the password filling service you've chosen (in my case keepass), and it loads up, no differently from when there's a password prompt. I'm not sure how it works on other platforms like iOS, windows, or linux, but at least on android, you can use a FOSS password manager not integrated into the OS.
Specific sites aren't locking down TOTP, this seems to be an EEE scheme of Authy specifically, since as you say the TOTP codes provided by sites still work with other authenticators. I'm referring to the case where say, amazon forces you to use their app to login, or creates their own custom TOTP or passkey app, and won't let you log into their site without it, and then you have no control over your login method or codes.
By integrated into the OS, I'm talking about the major corporate implementations, like Apple, Microsoft Windows, or Google Android. The advantage is that you don't need to install an app or browser extension, and then give that app permissions. Everything is already set up. I've seen some websites like Amazon try to automatically set up passkeys for you, so it's likely that a good portion of the population already has passkeys set up in these corporate passkey managers, before they have the opportunity to learn about alternatives.
Speaking of Keepass, you should check out these discussions:
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#issuecomment-1994673954
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406
In short, keepass had a way of exporting passkeys unencrypted to disk, and some people did not like that, threatening things like:
This is exactly what the "passkeys are a trap" article warned about. Passkey attestation allows websites to reject specific clients, just like how SafetyNet allows apps to block GrapheneOS users. In the future, banking websites or google.com could force usage of passkeys, and block usage of keepass. Are there enough keepass users to protest this? Certainly hasn't worked well for GrapheneOS and SafetyNet.
Functionally, it's locked down because it's nearly impossible to migrate the TOTP codes to another app.
You don't really see custom TOTP apps because users don't want to have to install an app just to generate TOTP codes for a specific website. Google Authenticator could have done this, but I think Google decided to start moving towards passkeys instead of enshittifying Google Authenticator.
There is much more incentive to do this with passkeys, because you can lock down passkey sharing in ways that can't be done with TOTP. For example, Netflix could block passkeys from any client that allows passkey copies and exports, like Keepass, in order to block account sharing.