Do you people trust companies with passkeys?

I feel like big tech have started pushing for passkeys really hard lately. Microsoft has been asking me if I want to switch to passkeys pretty consistently. Google just automatically brings up the passkey registration fingerprint scan system dialogue every single time I’ve been signing in on Android. Without even asking if I want a passkey or not, it just does it without saying anything. I think the intention is pretty clear, an unknowing person sees the completely random fingerprint scan dialogue, doesn’t think much of it, scans their fingerprint, a passkey gets created automatically.

Well, I fell for their trick. I’ve been avoiding the passkey dialogue pretty consistently for a while now, but just now I was signing in while distracted and accidentally tapped my finger on the scanner by reflex on the prompt. I guess I have a passkey now. Yay.

I did some digging on my Google account settings and the internet, and I couldnt find a way to completely remove the passkey. It seems you can only disable the use of passkeys, but the passkey itself remains. There is also a setting called “Skip password when possible”, which is clearly what has been causing the non-stop passkey prompts. It’s on by default. It’s a shame I’m only aware of it now that its too late.

Theoretically, the passkey standart itself should be private and secure. Throughout the process, the biometric information used for the cryptographic challenges never leaves the device, and the server only gets access to a signature that has been signed with the client’s private keys that it can use to authenticate but can’t derive the private keys back from because of complicated math I didn’t spend enough energy to understand. Google automatically syncs the passkeys with its private keys with E2EE in the Google Password Manager tied to the account, which is where I start to get uncomfortable because I can’t bring myself to trust Google with E2EE.

What do you people think?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    16·
    1 day ago

    There are a few main benefits.

    1. For hardware-backed keys they can’t be stolen aside from physically stealing the hardware. So unless your machine has malware there is no way for an attacker to authenticate using them.
    2. Even for software keys the site you authenticate to doesn’t learn enough to impersonate you. For example if for some reason your bank leaked some logs with PW + MFA someone could use that to log in as you (although admittedly short timeouts on MFA validity makes that window very small).
    3. The browser ensures that you only authenticate to the correct domain. So it prevents phishing. (Although a password manager that only fills into the correct domain also accomplishes this.)

    So I think if you are using unique passwords with an automated password manager the effective benefit is quite small. However for the “average computer user” who likely has less than 5 passwords that they use for everything it forces a pretty high base level of security.