Comment on Passkeys are generally available on GitHub

anti_antidote@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Greensauce@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m stealing this from another comment:

  The main advantage comes with phishing resistance. Standard MFA (time based codes) is not phishing resistant. Users can be social engineered into giving up a password and MFA token. Other MFA types, such as pop up notifications, are susceptible to MFA fatigue. Similar to YubiKeys, Passkeys implement a phishing resistant MFA by storing an encryption key, along with requiring a biometric. The benefit here is that these are far easier for the average user, and the user does not need to carry a physical device. Sure, fingerprints could possibly be grabbed with physical presence, but there is far less risk that a users fingerprint is stolen, than a user being social engineered over the phone into giving creds. For most organizations and users, this is far more secure.

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  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Standard MFA (time based codes) is not phishing resistant. Users can be social engineered into giving up a password and MFA token.

    So basically this is just idiot-proofing the system. If you aren’t the type of person to give your password or MFA token to another person, then passkeys don’t really make better security.

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    • 0xc0ba17@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      idiot-proofing

      Don’t chalk it up to idiots. The quote mentions “MFA fatigue”, which is something that definitely happens.

      If you’re a Windows user (and moreso if you play games on your computer), you certainly regularly have admin prompts. I’m pretty sure that, like everyone else, you just click OK without a second thought. That’s fatigue. Those prompts exist for a security reason, yet there are so many of them that they don’t register anymore and have lost all their meaning.

      For my job, I often have to login into MS Azure, and there are days where I have to enter my MFA 3 or 4 times in a row. I expect it, so I don’t really look at the prompt anymore. I just enter the token to be done with it asap; that’s a security risk

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      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It also doesn’t take into account the technological advances that scammers are using more and more. Get a phone call from your boss requesting something sensitive? How sure are you that it really is your boss and not an AI generated voice relying on data from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. run through a ChatGPT style system to respond to all manner of small talk etc?

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    • whosdadog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It also allows you to login without someone visually observing your password while typing it on a keyboard or on an untrusted device that could have a keylogger.

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  • atheken@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And, they are actually more convenient because then entire login process is one step, rather than two.

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    • beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What’s the backup login mechanism when you lose your biometric sensor? How do you pair with the new sensor?

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      • atheken@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You can still keep password + 2FA on GitHub and Google Suite (probably anything else that’s currently implementing them), it’s just a convenience/anti-phishing feature right now.

        The passkey is synced between devices if it’s kept in a password manager, I haven’t looked at the mechanism that Apple uses to sync it/use it if you store it in the system keychain. I guess you could also have multiple passkeys configured for a few devices.

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  • takeda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I kind of don’t like to store my fingerprints with Google. Even FBI collects them when you are indicted.

    What about allowing us to log in to services via asymmetric keys?

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    • Greensauce@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You don’t have to store them with Google. Passkeys are supported in both iOS and Android natively. Within the last few months both Bitwarden and 1Password support storing passkeys as well.

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    • valpackett@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Note that you pretty much can’t store them with Google or Apple; smartphone biometric sensors operate the on-device HSM, not something remote.

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      • takeda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So, how does it work when you are accessing account from a different device? How the other device knows your fingerprint?

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    • Trivial@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is just an asymmetric key. Phones try to store them securely but you could use an app to just generate them and store your key wherever.

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    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Eh. The feds already have my fingerprints due to a background check…

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• Klajan@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  From just now reading the Docs regarding passkeys.

  The main draw seems to be that it is easy to sign in (just requiring biometrics for example) and mainly a lot more resistant to phishing.

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• Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  At this point, you probably shouldn’t.

  At some point, passkeys will be ubiquitous enough they’ll be like low friction SSH keys for web authentication (i.e. there will be no shared secrets in the login process).

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• Asudox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It has its own pros. The biggest one is that it uses asymmetric cryptography. This means that the only one that can sign a challenge given by the server is the one that has the private key equivalent of the public key the challenge was used to be encrypted with. The challenge is sent to the client, in which the client signs the challenge the server sent with their private key and then sent back to the server. Since the server has the public key, the server can verify whether the signature is indeed from the private key owner. This is the reason why it is phish proof. Though I am not sure whether a phisher can just take the challenge, let the victim sign it and then give back the challenge to login. Can anyone confirm that?

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  • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They are not better than hardware keys (since they are basically software versions of physical hardware keys), but at least better than passwords.

    That is not technically correct. Passkey is a protocol first and foremost, and the way it is implemented is up to the vendor. Can be software, eg. Apple, Google, Bitwarden, etc, but you can as well use a hardware key, eg. Yubikey has Passkey support for quite a while now.

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    • Asudox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The reason why I said that is because they are currently only stored in the cloud. It’s not like hardware and passkeys function differently. It’s just that a physical key (that you have) is more secure than having it on some companies computers.

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