Basically the problem is that Passkeys are designed to allow a particularly bad enshittification once everyone uses them. So it’s not about downsides of using them now, but about them being used in general and then abused.

I like the article and agree with the problem, but I’m skeptical that this works as a strategy to fix the problem. First off, individual responsibility or boycott doesn’t really work. Most people will just use what their phone gives. Second if the corporations do want to do this, they could implement it separately in their apps, like twitter or google chrome requiring quasi-attested “homebrew” passkeys stored in cryptoprocessors. Ultimately I do not think we have any power to prevent them from doing that.

The time of democracy and pluralism is over. We’re already seeing the author of the article being maligned and personally attacked for talking about AI - how dares he? On all fronts we have lost the culture war and lost power, economic power, information power like access to truth.

Healthequity tried forcing this passkey garbage on me, and they wouldn’t allow me to manage investments over the phone, so I ended up transferring everything to a different HSA provider. Not giving in. I love TOTP though.

Corporations want what they’re terming phishing-resistant passkeys, which have two approaches: hardware-based or synchronized passkeys. If they are forced upon us for certain services or jobs, the least harmful to a worker is a synchronized passkey. Password managers like Bitwarden support this, so that you don’t have vendors and employers tracking your cell phone. If an employer uses something like Microsoft, the administrator settings may not allow synchronized passkeys…but at least we can advocate for them when these auth methods are forced upon us.

Yeah the technology is cool but I stay away from passkeys and tell people not to use them because there’s too much room to permanently screw up.

Maybe they’ll remove the non portable type from the spec or roll it into an enterprise equivalent like with ad.

Passkeys give me anxiety because it’s like “Hope you can go the rest of your life without a phone or USB drive getting lost or stolen LMAO”

So it’s HDMI for login? Thanks, I hate it.

An attempt to make an image describing where passkeys live:

As far as I know using a password manager such as KeePassXC or Bitwarden solves all of these problems?

dude speaks about not being able to write down his passkey, then he acts like it can only be saved in bigtech clouds, then some random ai rumbling starts about ads being show to us? can you guys stop posting these god damn fearmongering password articles written by ai?

Please just stop using a service when it gets unbearable. There is no online service you -need- except maybe bank and tax stuff.

I suspected as much, being shoved on us like AI.

It’s wild seeing people spaz out over passkeys, clearly venting at something that isn’t passkeys.

This is the feature that means you no longer get to make the calls about your passkeys. Fortunately, attested passkeys are not yet required on most websites. But the FIDO Alliance standard makes attestation a part of the passkey ecosystem, whether you want it or not. And even if the website doesn’t require attestation now, simply by using passkeys you indicate to the website that your setup supports the FIDO Alliance’s passkey standard and that you as a user are capable of using passkeys.9 This means that once Twitter (formally X) is satisfied that the overwhelming majority of its users would be unaffected, they can flip the switch – perhaps not all at once, perhaps just for ten thousand users at a time so as not to cause a fuss – and start rejecting non-attested passkeys.

Critically, remote attestation requires the co-operation of your cryptoprocessor, your passkey manager software, your device’s operating system, and your device’s firmware to all pass the remote attestation check. After all, your phone’s operating system has total access to all the 0s and 1s in every app that’s ever run, so it’s not enough for Twitter (formally X) to trust your passkey manager if it can’t even trust your phone’s underlying operating system. If any single one of those things were to fail – say, because your phone stopped receiving security updates so you installed a custom operating system like LineageOS to keep yourself safe without having to buy a new device – then Twitter (formally X) will be able to notice and prevent you from logging in.

Remote attestation can allow them to verify that your device is not capable of, say, sending and receiving encrypted messages, or running a competitor’s app, or using social media without verifying your ID. They don’t want you to be able to turn off the mandatory built-in AI image scanner on your phone that scans everything your phone sees for nudity. (Yes, I’m serious.)

The convenience of using passkeys is a double-edged sword.

This is also one of the ways Playstation stops you from installing Linux and other unauthorised software on the PS5.

finally people are waking up to this garbage.

Zero trust is the end station, if you allow organizations to treat your personal devices as being theirs. Organizations that could actually benefit from the increased security (which isn’t Twitter, except for some high-profile individuals, maybe), should provide the user with resources to do so, at their expense (issuing a dedicated TOTP device for example).

But what tends to happen instead, is enshittification of service, while offloading it onto the client. A similar trend can be observed with car parking: where operators remove parking meters, and require the customer to use their device and data plan, to make a payment to the operator…

We’ve been on this trajectory for quite a while now: from Outlook enforcing IT-policies of email administrators (dictating screen locking requirements as device administration app), to SMS-based 2FA requiring one to have a mobile phone number and tying all to this tamper-resistant identifier. So why not a black box snitch, paid for by the client, further restrict their freedom for “security”?

It seems perfectly in line, and I think this article draws all the right parallels.