Comment on The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
4am@lemm.ee 5 weeks agoPasskeys are much better. Unlike what FAANG companies want you to believe, they do not have to be tied to a device. Use a password manager that supports them (BitWarden) and pretty much never get hacked again because of a password. Website doesn’t need to store anything that an attacker can use. No downside.
I’d much rather use a password and a two-factor auth via TOTP code. It’s fast, portable, I can store them on a variety of open source apps, and it’s very hard to hack. I don’t need to use a specific provider, or browser. Flexible and free.
Passkeys in their current implementation are comparatively a mess. Here’s an article that runs through many reasons why:
Mendicant_Bias@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
Any recommended reading for pass keys to get me up to speed? I use Bitwarden and have been happy enough with just passwords via that for a long time now. Only time I’ve seen pass keys mentioned really was Google trying to push it on me but I don’t use their password manager.
4am@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
A passkey is a public/private key pair used instead of a password. You store the private key, and the website stores the public key. Data encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by the private key, and vice-versa.
This means you can share the public key freely with the website, and even if they get hacked and the public keys are stolen, they’re useless.
When you log in, they send you a challenge encrypted with the public key, and since you hold the private key, you can decrypt it, create a response to it, re-encrypt it with the private key, and send the response to the website; which then decrypts it with the public key to verify it.
The initial spec was that each device would have its own passkey and store it in a TPM (that thing Microsoft requires your computer to have for Windows 11), which is a secure memory storage location that only the kernel can access.
However BitWarden is also able to store them and make them portable. (I think the standard was loosened to allow for this? But don’t quote me on that.) So, now you can have one passkey for the site and it works anywhere you can use BitWarden’a browser extension.
TLDR: more secure than a password, nothing to forget, stops passwords being stolen.