Comment on Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts
CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 1 year agoThe problem with passkeys is that surrender of a physical key is not protected by the 4th amendment and subject to seizure. From a security perspective, I agree that passkeys are good. But I only use a physical key as a secondary factor. Never a primary.
The courts have ruled that you can’t be forced to give up a password or passcode. (We’ll have to see if the current court will keep this precedent.)
Until we get better privacy protections, I’m not trusting passkeys whole cloth.
There is no implementation right now that enables you to own and manage your own passkey backups without Google it icloud.
Additionally, the attestation feature is one step away from banks and other sites mandating specific implementations, preventing people from using software tokens or OSS managers.
Passkeys is great, and I am eager to recommend it to everyone, but without those items addressed, it’s a trap door, and one bitflip away from very strong lock in.
I just set my passkey up in Dashlane. It does not require Google or iCloud.
The same webauthn standard allows you to use a security key with PIN luck
My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected so if you secure your phone with that, access to it is under 4th amendment protection. Given this, I’m curious how passkey legality would work out since it’s a physical key, but access to use it would still require “something you know”.
Passkeys will not protect you against the government.
As I said elsewhere, it’s for web services. The web service provider will have to surrender your data on a court order. They can decouple it from the passkey. The passkey doesn’t encrypt your data at the provider, it’s only used for authentication.
If you really want to protect your data, you will need to use a different encryption solution. Something like full disk encryption with a complex pass phrase.
alvvayson@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You can protect your passkeys with a knowledge element.
But I don’t see your use case. Passkeys are about logging in to webservices, not about protecting devices.
Web service providers can always be ordered to surrender your data by a court. Very few of them even try to encrypt your data. And for those that do, a court order could still force them to intercept your password and decrypt the data.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 year ago
If you replace passwords with passkeys that must be protected by a password, you haven’t replaced passwords, you’ve just moved where the attack can happen. While I think there’s certainly value in that, it’s very disingenuous to say you’ve replaced passwords.
Passkeys are used for more than web services and have the possibility to replace other security options elsewhere (being something you have, one of the three secrets possible). Their lack of protection, at least in the United States, is a very serious problem. Your points do nothing to address this and highlight just how bad the situation is.
alvvayson@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You should really read up on multi-factor authentication and Web-Authn.
Your problem seems more that you don’t trust Google to store your private keys in their cloud.
And that’s fine. You don’t have to do that. But don’t be confused to think that’s the only option. You can buy a yubikey or a Trezor model T if you prefer.
Passkeys are just a marketing term for Web-Authn. When you use asymmetric keys for other purposes, it’s not passkeys.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 year ago
I missed the part where I said I don’t trust Google. You seemed to have ignored everything of substance in my response, namely putting a password on the passkey doesn’t remove passwords and the extension of things like FIDO2 beyond web auth.