Passkeys do marginally improve security against MITM and phishing attacks, but they are primarily for protecting the lowest common denominator from themselves: people who re-use passwords and/or don't use a password manager.
If you use multiple devices throughout the day, registering passkeys in all of these systems becomes a big headache with O(m*n) complexity, so putting the passkeys in a password manager is the only realistic solution. But this still breaks the login flow for a very common use case: how do I log in on a device that I don't own? With a password in a password manager I at least have the option of manually typing the password.
The biggest problem, though, is how users are pushed into it without any warning or knowledge of what they're signing up for. I've accidentally set up passkeys just by clicking an okay button a few times in the past and had to go back and figure out how to undo it after being blocked from login on another computer (which computer was I on again?).
The offer a strong protection against phishing attacks that would still get plenty of password manager users: fake websites. A passkey is strongly linked to a domain, so a fake site can't get that credential.
Some password managers will only fill if a domain matches, but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in. I've also seen lots of them do stuff like happily autofill on any prefix of the domain, so your credential for `something.example.com` will autofill into `fake-something.example.com`.
> but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in.
I've seen people do this AFK as well, and I'm always helpfully suggesting them the correct way of solving this: verifying the URL again, and if correct, add it to the password manager so it remembers in the future, and never copy-paste passwords on the web. Basically 50/50 if they take the advice or come back after a week asking if it's safe to copy-paste the password into the website, and I try to inform again.
Shockingly, I saw one developer peer copy-pasting a password into a website, but I guess for these people there is no hope.
There are too many websites where this is broken for me (even with Firefox's built-in password fill) to go as far as to never copy-paste passwords. If web devs actually implemented it consistently, I might be that draconian about it, but asking them to do that when we already have the '200 MB of JS is needed to view this page' problem, I have my doubts we're going to see this problem going away any time soon.
Probably the whole authentication thing shouldn't be implemented by the website at all. There should be some standardized way to ask for authentication that's implemented by the browser or the operating system.
drtz · · focus · HN ↗
If you use multiple devices throughout the day, registering passkeys in all of these systems becomes a big headache with O(m*n) complexity, so putting the passkeys in a password manager is the only realistic solution. But this still breaks the login flow for a very common use case: how do I log in on a device that I don't own? With a password in a password manager I at least have the option of manually typing the password.
The biggest problem, though, is how users are pushed into it without any warning or knowledge of what they're signing up for. I've accidentally set up passkeys just by clicking an okay button a few times in the past and had to go back and figure out how to undo it after being blocked from login on another computer (which computer was I on again?).
Latty · · focus · HN ↗
Some password managers will only fill if a domain matches, but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in. I've also seen lots of them do stuff like happily autofill on any prefix of the domain, so your credential for `something.example.com` will autofill into `fake-something.example.com`.
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen people do this AFK as well, and I'm always helpfully suggesting them the correct way of solving this: verifying the URL again, and if correct, add it to the password manager so it remembers in the future, and never copy-paste passwords on the web. Basically 50/50 if they take the advice or come back after a week asking if it's safe to copy-paste the password into the website, and I try to inform again.
Shockingly, I saw one developer peer copy-pasting a password into a website, but I guess for these people there is no hope.
Telaneo · · focus · HN ↗
raron · · focus · HN ↗