11–20 of 789 posts
Honestly, I think a big part of the problem is that passkeys have been tied to hardware devices and they don't have to be. A passkey is just a public key credential, and it can easily be provided by software as well as by hardware. You would still get many of the benefits (better UX, automatically secure, prevents phishing) and the overall customer experience could be a lot better. Imagine if passkeys could be saved,…
So, yeah, useless technology for now. Passwords and TOTPs are the way.
Oof, the Passkeys ecosystem is incredibly complex. Even as someone that deals with it day in and day out at $CURRENT_CO, it can be a headache. As an exercise from a developer's perspective, try creating a chart of every device type (mobile, desktop etc), browser, and Passkeys platform provider (Apple, Microsoft etc). Then fill out how each behaves across each combination, it is a nightmare! I'm hopeful that we'll see…
Definitely this. I think the worst aspect of Passkeys is that the noble goals (public key crypto! unphisability!) seem to somewhat unavoidably wipe out one of the--in hindsight--really valuable aspects of passwords-in-a-password-manager: That you can always just copy them out, put them in a different password manager, or write them on a post-it. That said, I think this is a byproduct of the design space being complex…
Is the author suggesting he’s not traveling to the US out of security concerns? Is that really a thing?
I use iCloud's Passkeys extensively and have never had saved Passkeys "wiped out". I am not disputing that data loss bugs can happen, but three times for one user sounds pretty weird given the maturity of the ecosystem. The most obvious explanations seem to me to be: a) Apple loses data (presumably not just Passkeys, but also photos, passwords, and other highly noticeable stuff) all the time, and I've been lucky for…
Agreed. I'm not so sure that some of the iCloud data loss bugs people talk about are actual data loss bugs. I've had a few issues over the years. Firstly I spent weeks chasing down what I thought was a data loss bug in iCloud. After much effort I managed to reproduce it. Turned out it was an issue with TeXshop rather than iCloud. Secondly, the one time I had a photo lost, it wasn't lost. I just couldn't find it in th…
But the implication that Keychain just kind of forgets saved Passkeys once in a while seems alarmist and probably unfounded.
Passkeys are pretty useless for me. At first I was somewhat hyped, but it seems that everyone just ignores them. Chrome does not support them. I set it up on mac, today I tried to login to icloud using passkey, but it just didn't work. Few websites implemented them, but overwhelming majority of websites don't. So, yeah, useless technology for now. Passwords and TOTPs are the way.
Oof, the Passkeys ecosystem is incredibly complex. Even as someone that deals with it day in and day out at $CURRENT_CO, it can be a headache. As an exercise from a developer's perspective, try creating a chart of every device type (mobile, desktop etc), browser, and Passkeys platform provider (Apple, Microsoft etc). Then fill out how each behaves across each combination, it is a nightmare! I'm hopeful that we'll see…
My conclusion so far is that it's a promising technology, but no way as mature as I'd like it to be. Unfortunately we are stuck with emails and passwords for the foreseeable future, at least as a back-up mechanism for credentials recovery, which, funnily, makes the whole thing pretty much pointless.
Is the author suggesting he’s not traveling to the US out of security concerns? Is that really a thing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I'm not so sure that some of the iCloud data loss bugs people talk about are actual data loss bugs. I've had a few issues over the years. Firstly I spent weeks chasing down what I thought was a data loss bug in iCloud. After much effort I managed to reproduce it. Turned out it was an issue with TeXshop rather than iCloud. Secondly, the one time I had a photo lost, it wasn't lost. I just couldn't find it in th…
To be clear, I don't work for Apple. :) And I'm not discounting that there are usage patterns that might lead to persistent bad experiences (like your example with Numbers). But the implication that Keychain just kind of forgets saved Passkeys once in a while seems alarmist and probably unfounded.
I will say that there are some very well known backup and restore issues with keychain however so I keep anything critical in MacPass as the primary copy.