Technology

The lock-in effect of passkeys is something that this protocol aims to solve though. The “only managed by your device” is what keeps us locked in, if there is no solution to export and import it on another device.

The protocol aims to make it easy to import and export passkeys so you can switch to a different provider. This way you won’t be stuck if you create passkeys e.g. on an Apple device and want to switch to e.g. Bitwarden or an offline password manager like KeyPassXC

The specifications are significant for a few reasons. CXP was created for passkeys and is meant to address a longstanding criticism that passkeys could contribute to user lock-in by making it prohibitively difficult for people to move between operating system vendors and types of devices. […] CXP aims to standardize the technical process for securely transferring them between platforms so users are free […].

That's a great way to lose access if your device gets lost, stolen, or destroyed. Which is why I'm against and will continue to be against forcing 2FA and MFA solutions onto people. I don't want this, services don't care if we're locked out which is why they're happy to force this shit onto people.

Actually, it is still a problem, because passwords are a shared secret between you and the server, which means the server has that secret in some sort of form. With passkeys, the server never has the secret.

Never forget that technologically speaking you're nothing like the average user. Only 1 in 3 users use password managers. Most people just remember 1 password and use it everywhere (or some other similarly weak setup).

Not remembering passwords is a huge boon for most users, and passkeys are a very simple and secure way of handling it.

That’s exactly how passkeys work. The server never has the private key.

KeePass has passkey support

Passkeys are an ancient authentication setup, have always been better than passwords and are finally getting traction.

What do you means by this? What part do you want to be open source? Passkey are just cryptographic keys, no part of that requires anything unfree. There's aready an open source authentication stack you can use to implement them. You can store them completely locally with KeyPassXC for selfhost Vaultwarden to store them remotely. Both are open source?

You can add them in vaultwarden.

One is a new technical specification called Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) that will make passkeys portable between digital ecosystems, a feature that users have increasingly demanded.

I.e. I can copy my key to my friends' device.

Usually just an option in addition to a password + MFA. Or they just replace the MFA option and still require a password. I even saw some variants where it replaced the password but still required a MFA code. It's all over the place. Some providers artificially limit passkeys to certain (usually mobile) platforms.

It's not unreasonable at all. I locked myself out of several accounts after everyone recommended keypass for TOTP and then I lost all the keys. Getting those accounts back was a fucking nightmare.

This is a weird thread. Lots of complaints about lock in and companies managing your keys, both of which are easily avoidable, the exact same way you'd do so with your passwords.

After my password manager auto filled a password and logged me in the website said "Tired of remembering passwords? Want to add a passkey?" I didn't know what it meant so I said no lol.

I think you actually have to buy a passkey device. Then configure it to work with a particular account.

You plug the passkey into your computer and then whenever it asks for a password you literally touch it and it does its thing. I think there are options like biometrics that you can add on top but you don't have to have that.

The author of your blog post comes to this conclusion:

So do yourself a favour. Get something like bitwarden or if you like self hosting get vaultwarden. Let it generate your passwords and manage them. If you really want passkeys, put them in a password manager you control. But don't use a platform controlled passkey store, and be very careful with security keys.

The protocol (CXP) which the article is about, would allow you to export the passkeys from the “platform controlled passkey store” and import them into e.g. Bitwarden. So i would imagine the author being in favor of the protocol.

No. Wtf no.

I don't want my government hosting my email.

The last time they had to do anything important they stoled all the sensitive data in plain text in an Excel spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet got corrupted so they lost everything. Of course they didn't have backups.

I bet the gov would love to host your email and have access to all the same info Google does...

Correct. The spec is about making it easier and more secure to export your passwords and passkeys when you move from one password manager to another. People are misunderstanding this as some sort of federated authentication system to share your credentials between multiple password managers at the same time, which it is not.