this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
292 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

59329 readers
4564 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From Ricky Mondello, who works on passkeys at Apple: “If it’s device-bound, it’s not a passkey”:

https://hachyderm.io/@rmondello/111188643228872151

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a terrible take ... He's confusing "what it does and how it works" with "how you manage it".

It's like saying "don't call it a password if you write it down". It's confusing and unhelpful.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No it's literally in the spec. Passkeys are designed for cross device synchronization. You have to go out of your way to make it local only (or use a different webauthn spec like physical security keys)

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

They're just private keys. By nature you can copy them wherever you want. I guess I don't know why he's making that distinction at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The original spec is resident keys including TPM protected or hardware token protected keys designed to be impossible to copy. That's why there's a distinction.