Bitwarden adds support for passkeys

You’re not really “trusting a company with the keys to your digital life”.

The vault is encrypted with a password that never gets transmitted, and even if your password and vault gets stolen, without the additional “secret key” that also never leaves your device (and you should probably print and store somewhere safe), an attacker won’t be able to do much with it.

The inclusion of an additional secret key makes a huge difference in this setup. but yes, it would be much nicer if I could use my own sync store like in the past… (looking at EnPass currently which also has a secret key setup and own sync store)

My biggest peeve is that if you search for a password and you happen to be in the "Card" category for example, it will return 0 results. A good alternative would be to show No Results for the category you are in, but then provide results for other categories below.

Some snippets from the FAQ [1].

> The public key is stored on the website and the private key is stored on your device or in your passkey provider, e.g. your Bitwarden Vault.

> Passkeys are often able to sync across your devices, however not all platforms support this yet.

So it sounds like it's not stored in hardware. It'll be interesting to see how it works if solutions that use a TPM or similar start to emerge. I have nearly 1000 passwords and many of them are shared with colleagues, parents, siblings, etc.. I can't even imagine a way you could make that work if the private key is owned by a TPM (aka a hardware bound key) and needs to be enrolled somehow prior to becoming usable.

What happens if I have 500 passkeys backed by keys in a TPM and I get a new computer?

1. https://bitwarden.com/resources/passkeys-faq/

> But essentially it's a certificate...

I'll put upfront that I'm no expert in any of this, but ... unlike passwords and certificates, attestation is a thing for passkeys. The thing being attested to is "the private key of this cert is being secured by X". X might be YubiKey in the case of a FIDO2 key, or Google or Apple in the case of passkeys.

This aspect of passkeys made me uncomfortable with them. If Google is going to attest they manage your passkey, then it follows the aren't giving a copy to anybody, including you. That means if you lose your Google account you've lost control of your ID. But note: that's control, not the keys themselves. You probably will have a copy of them on a phone, so you can still use them until that phone dies. But when it does you've in a world of pain because you can't backup / transfer / copy them - only Google can do that. In effect you don't own your Google passkey - Google does.

I don't know if Bitwarden does attestation now, or if the are planning to implement it in the future. But if either of those things are true they can't give you a copy of the key, ever.

This still makes me uncomfortable. But I can see why it is so. You and I may be capable of protecting a private key, but my mother and 99% of the rest of the planet aren't. Your bank or whoever trusting me on my say so isn't going to work, so the end result of us never being able to manage our own keys is inevitable. We have to put them in the hands of a 3rd party the bank or whoever can trust.

And it is ameliorated by another aspect of FIDO2 / passkeys: unlike passwords where you can only have one per site, sites are expected to support many FIDO2 keys for the same person. And, you are expected to keep several of them and authenticate each of them at every site you use. So you might have a Google one, and a Bitwarden one, and maybe even a Keypass one. If you did you solve the "Google owns my ID" problem, but it's such a pain in the arse to do I don't see it happening.

We've seen several iterations of this concept: FIDO, WebAuthn/FIDO2, and now passkeys. I'd like to see one more: some way of bundling up a whole pile of passkeys from different providers, so when I establish a new account on a web site, I register all of them. That would make maintaining a bunch of PassKeys trackable. Right now, the reality is bugger all people are going to do it. And as a consequence, a good chunk of the planet is going to end up with Apple / Google / whoever owning their identities. And of course some of them are going to lose their relationship they had with there ID manager, and wake up one day to discover themselves wiped from the digital planet.

How do you hide subdomain ?