this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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292
Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
187 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won't work on another device.

Now I don't know if that key can be stolen or not, or if it's really more secure or not, as people have really unsecure pins.

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[–] Asudox 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. Since passkeys are basically asymmetric keys, SSH technically had "passkeys" for years.
[–] alvvayson 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, but that's missing the important part.

Passkeys is not primarily about asymmetric keys. It's about applying asymmetric keys to the Web as an open standard.

The W3C Web-Authn standard is what makes it important and revolutionary.

This is just as important as HTML, CSS and ActivityPub.

Finally we have an open standard that integrates in the web and offers a high level of security.

[–] jarfil 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is that like TLS client-side certificates?

[–] alvvayson 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's actually quite similar, yes, in the sense that it uses a public/private key pair linked to your account.

But this works on the application layer and you don't use certificates.

Much easier to setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Also it generates unique keys per site so it doesn't help anybody track you

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Just an example of protocol different than HTTP.