Privacy

32173 readers

269 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

487

Bitwarden, Dashlane, 1Password and others have joined together to make passkeys portable (bitwarden.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Looks like a huge amount of security vendors are working to have a secure and open standard for passkey portability between platforms.

It is always good to see major collaboration in the security space like this considering the harsh opinions that users of some of these vendors have toward many of the others. I just wish apps and sites would stop making me login with username and password if passkeys are meant to replace that lol.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'd like to see some documentation that says passkeys were intended to never be synced across anything.

Everything I have ever read is that it's basically asymmetric cryptography like ssh keys. You have a private one, generate the public and give it to the site. It stops reuse of passwords and site breaches become useless as the public key is useless for attacking an account on another site, etc. (well, besides whatever data was lost in the breach which is outside the scope.)

I see no reason to limit someone having the private key on their phone, their desktop, etc. Having to generate yet another passkey for every device is inefficient and would decrease adoption of this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yea, ssh private keys as well are intended to only stay on Device that generated it. The idea is, that the device you want to connect to has all the puplic keys of all devices you want connect from in their known hosts directory. And you should not transfer private keys.

But of course there is always a battle between convince and security, so there were ways created to transfer encrypted private keys protected with a password.

And the same happened to passkeys.

I myself choose convenience over security in that regard and share my private keys and passkeys on my devices and thus am happy about that development.

The thing is, having options is often good, so a person should be able to choose passkeys in the secure way where you can invoke each device individually and never have the passkey to leave the device where it was generated. To achieve this, website need to allow multiple passkeys to be used, and would be expected from a bank, in my opinion. Maybe they think it is more secure to have just one passkey on one device, which it is, but how do you recover your account if that device dies?