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Passkeys: A shattered dream

fy.blackhats.net.au

181–190 of 789 posts

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#181

I’ve avoided passkeys so far because I just don’t have a good mental model of them. All my passwords are randomly generate and stored in a password manager so I really haven’t felt the need to switch or felt constrained by my existing set up. I fully understand username/email + password and remembering the pain of things like “app specific passwords” makes me worry that some tools (open source, cli, etc) might not in…

Nice phrasing, I lack that mental model as well. Anyone here willing to distill down the whole thing to a few sentences? Who stores what kind of secret, and is there some kind of challenge/response at auth time?

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#182

The biggest issue with passkeys is that I just can't trust the companies offering them. They are locked into the platform for reasons that are ostensibly security but often indistinguishable from platform lock-in. If you make a passkey on an Apple device as far as I can tell it will never leave that device, ever, and there is no way to change this. Of course this means you can never be phished for your credentials bu…

You can always use passkeys like Yubikey or others which are much more multi-platform.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because desktop linux does not have passkey interface built into the OS. There needs to be TPM, systemd, etc need to talk altogether.

Linux most definitely has a TPM interface, it's called /dev/tpmrm0 and plenty of libraries for accessing it (eg. https://github.com/parallaxsecond/rust-tss-esapi/ full disclosure: I'm co-maintaining it). Systemd is not needed for that.

So where are things falling down? I seem to be unable to get passkeys to work in linux; Chrome or Firefox. I’m suspecting the issue is something to do with bluetooth.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#184

I’ve avoided passkeys so far because I just don’t have a good mental model of them. All my passwords are randomly generate and stored in a password manager so I really haven’t felt the need to switch or felt constrained by my existing set up. I fully understand username/email + password and remembering the pain of things like “app specific passwords” makes me worry that some tools (open source, cli, etc) might not in…

The mental model is very simple. If you use things like Yubikey, it is exactly like a key you use to start your car. A single password protected key maybe. In essence, it is your password manager but something that everyone can use. And something that doesn't need to be on the cloud.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#185

I’ve avoided passkeys so far because I just don’t have a good mental model of them. All my passwords are randomly generate and stored in a password manager so I really haven’t felt the need to switch or felt constrained by my existing set up. I fully understand username/email + password and remembering the pain of things like “app specific passwords” makes me worry that some tools (open source, cli, etc) might not in…

>All my passwords are randomly generate and stored in a password manager so I really haven’t felt the need to switch or felt constrained by my existing set up.

The basic logic here is pretty clear imo. Passwords are still symmetric factors, and they're also completely unstandardized. So you still have to do a significant amount of manual management crap that should not exist, deal with UI that should not exist, and you still have to do some stuff if the other side (service provider) gets hacked. If we used bog standard pub/priv keys instead, then everything could become universally better. There'd be no need to worry about password policies, whether there is a character limit or not, how well and consistently individuals handle it, or anything like that ever again. Nor care if a site is breached, literally no action required because the site would only have the public key, they could publish it in clear text and it still wouldn't help attackers authenticate a single iota. Plus things like phishing and so on go away, because same thing, if the user has their agent browser to a malicious link or the like, and then it presents their pubkey, it still wouldn't do anything and the agent can't be fooled by similar looking to humans domains or anything. The agent would expect the service to present the proper signed request and anything else wouldn't work. Conceptually everything could be automated and standard without any sort of silo, all software could speak the same standard simple key format and everyone could back that up and sync it any way they wanted.

Unfortunately as is so often the case these days there's a lot of perverse incentives and players who can't resist the urge to try to add extra functionality in on top rather then just going for the low hanging fruit in a solid way first. So we've seen a confusing muddle, of existing players with financial interests who make money by helping lower the pain of the garbage that is password based mutal auth, those who see new chances to try to silo, those who want to shove in attestation and differences in password backing for good and bad reasons, mixing in concepts of hardware backing that are unnecessary, etc. I'm still hopeful something will come out of it in the end but it's been a real bummer to see how it's played out.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#186
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passkeys can’t be phished, or shoulder peeped, or entered on a malicious domain. And for the layman, it means they can’t forget their password. Technically the place where you store your passkeys can be hacked into, but there is no technology that protects against that. You could give a tech layman 5FA and he’ll give all 5 factors to the nice man on the phone call.

> Passkeys can’t be phished, or shoulder peeped, or entered on a malicious domain. And for the layman, it means they can’t forget their password. Neither can passwords if you’re using a password manager to handle them. So again, if you’ve already got a password manager, and would put your passkeys in a password manager, what is the benefit of passkeys?

You're wrong, with password managers you can definitely be phished. Unless it's literally impossible to extract the password to enter it manually, but I don't think password managers make that impossible (and if it's possible, users will do it).

With passkeys it's literally impossible.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#187
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same, you should not store or backup SSH Keys.

So I should get locked out of all services when my device breaks?

You should produce a key per device, and produce a backup key that is safely stored & not used anywhere.

You can recover if you lose all devices via your break-glass backup key, and you limit the blast radius of "my key got stolen" from rotating all your keys to just a single device (or maybe the more likely "I screwed up and pushed my key somewhere public")

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#188
post #27

This is quite concerning, because I've recently started a project that uses webauthn-rs. I want to minimise spam on the project while I don't want to collect PII like emails for login. I wonder if it means that the author will stop working on the library after their next release, and more importantly, if the UX is going to be horrible with people unable to log in and other issues they mention. On a tangent, I share t…

> I wonder if it means that the author will stop working on the library after their next release,

Just FYI it seems the library will still be maintained: https://infosec.exchange/@firstyear/112337225055591544

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#189
post #112

As someone who happily uses Yubikeys, I really don't want to use a Passkey. I want to still use a username/password and the Yubikey. Not just username and Yubikey. Google tries to force use of passkey now that if you enroll a Yubikey it will now be a Passkey, instead of a second factor. With no option to disable it. I have to run the Yubikey Manager tool and then disable "FIDO2", so that I can force it only be used a…

> I want to still use a username/password and the Yubikey. Why?

Definitely not for security... so yeah, seems quite pointless.

Re: Passkeys: A shattered dream

#190

I’ve avoided passkeys so far because I just don’t have a good mental model of them. All my passwords are randomly generate and stored in a password manager so I really haven’t felt the need to switch or felt constrained by my existing set up. I fully understand username/email + password and remembering the pain of things like “app specific passwords” makes me worry that some tools (open source, cli, etc) might not in…

The mental model is very simple. If you use things like Yubikey, it is exactly like a key you use to start your car. A single password protected key maybe. In essence, it is your password manager but something that everyone can use. And something that doesn't need to be on the cloud.

Apologies I dont mean to be rude, but this does not help me conceptualise passkeys in the slightest.
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