A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactly a passkey is. There’s a good reason for that. A passkey is in some sense one of two (or three) different things, depending on how it’s stored.
The biggest difference: nothing sensitive is stored on the server. No passwords, no password hashes, just a public key. No amount of brute forcing, dictionary attacks or rainbow tables can help an attacker log in with a public key.
“But what about phising? If the attacker has the public key, they can pretend to be the actual site and trick the user into logging in.” Only if they also manage to use the same domain name. Like a password manager, passkeys are stored for a specific domain name. If the domain doesn’t match, the passkey won’t be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNy_Q9fth-4 gives a pretty good introduction on them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=qNy_Q9fth-4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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This is something being sold in favor of passkeys but I can’t ser how “more secure” it is for me.
I use Bitwarden, the domain name matching works exactly like passkey’s. How more secure a passkey is, if it has 0 changes to this domain name detection?
With a breach of the server then they can get your password the next time you log in and maintain persistent access until they’re both kicked out and everybody has changed passwords.
With passkeys you don’t need to do anything, they never had your secret.