this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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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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[โ€“] Rehwyn 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My understanding is that, currently, a PIN or password is protected. So if you secure your phone with one of those, 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 a knowledge element.

[โ€“] alvvayson 1 points 1 year ago

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.