This may or may not help depending on how technical you are, but at the core a passkey works through public key cryptography, like SSH keys work. Setting up a passkey with a site involves sending a public key to the site, which they store as being owned by your account. Then, to sign in, they use your public key to generate a challenge, you use your private key to solve the challenge, and you respond proving you have the corresponding private key.
This means you never send your private key to the site, so if their database is compromised they only get a public key, which can’t do anything (it is public, after all)
No amount of phishing can get you or your client to hand over your private key, because there is no use case where that is required. There is no possibility of MITM, since your private key is never sent anywhere in any situation.
As for getting locked out of your account, losing your passkey would be the same as losing a password. You would need to follow the site’s password reset flow, and if you can recover from a lost password, you can recover from a lost passkey.
This is a fantastic explanation and analogy. Thank you!
I will poke at this a bit:
> As for getting locked out of your account, losing your passkey would be the same as losing a password. You would need to follow the site’s password reset flow, and if you can recover from a lost password, you can recover from a lost passkey.
Do you think this is one of those scenarios that sounds reasonable at first, but can get torn apart by unknowns, edge cases etc? To use an analogy from a recent HN thread that is stretched a bit, is this like saying "If you use a crypto hardware wallet, you're safe", then reading about compromised hardware wallets due to something outside the assumption set.
The threat models here are often very similar to existing Password Manager threat models. If an attacker gets access to your Password Manager they get access to every password you have stored there and can do what they like with that information. The same applies to your Passkey Manager, which in many cases (including for your own peace of mind) is/should be the same app/vault as your Password Manager for other types of passwords.
A lot of the same Password Manager requirements and best practices apply to Passkey Management such as using strong master passwords or biometric unlocks or device PINs. Using Password Managers that support device bound hardware security enclaves, etc.
But even more so than average Password Management, because Passkeys are public key infrastructure the benefits you get out of the box exceed those of ordinary passwords. One of the factors in most Passkey implementations here is that sites (defined by hostname) all get different public keys. (Users are suggested to use different passwords for every site, but are not required to. Passkeys do that technically and are generally enforced in that effort by browsers and Operating Systems.) Leaking those public keys is no longer an issue (they truly are public keys), and leaked public keys aren't generally useful to other sites and apps. (Passwords that leak and even sometimes salted and hashed passwords that leak are liabilities and can be useful for rainbow table attacks or social engineering attacks or password reuse attacks.)
There are certainly edge cases to Passkey Management but in general the threat models follow Password Management threats: does someone have physical access to your device? Do they have access to your biometrics or device PINs?
But also the blast radius is reduced compared to usual Password Management threats: a single leaked private key generally only impacts a single website/app. Being able to sign a Passkey challenge once doesn't mean unlimited access (a password can be used forever after finding it), because challenges have timestamps and random entropy and generally don't support replay at all.
Passkeys also open up other use cases like using a mobile device or hardware security token to log into sites from public computers, which, while not risk-free (targeted malware could still hijack your session while you're logged in), is still significantly safer than giving the public computer a password.
This is roughly analogous to the difference between swiped/card not present and chip/NFC credit card payments. While a hacked chip/NFC credit card terminal could display a different amount than actually charged, it can't subsequently make additional charges after the card or device is withdrawn.
Though obnoxiously, the public computer login method doesn’t rely solely on the QR code it shows, but also uses Bluetooth. So if you want to log in on a VM or computer without Bluetooth, or a physically distant computer being accessed remotely, you have no choice but to install your password manager on that computer. Which is a lot less secure than copying a single password and one-time code.
I am less interested in the threat models than the accidental denial of service models. I've avoided passkeys because of that. It seems like there are real problems if you use multiple devices not somehow symced.
I have started using Passkeys everywhere that I can. One of my "requirements" is "do they support multiple key enrollment". Most do, it's sort of required by the spec and semi-required in practice by the giant number of consumers in the US with iOS or Android phones and Windows PCs. The open source libraries certainly push you in the direction of implementing it properly multi-key per user. (I've also implemented Passkey-Only website login.)
I generally add keys from two very different Password Managers to every site/app I use Passkeys with. Both Password Managers also sync between multiple devices I own.
Redundancy is already an option. Choice in Password Managers to use for your Passkeys is an option.
I understand that accidental denial of service fear, but the tools exist technically to deal with that fear if you wanted to try to deal with it.
If you own only one device—a mobile phone, like the majority of people in the world—and you lose it, how do you get back into your passkey-protected email account?
This is site-specific, but typically by using the same mechanisms used to reset forgotten passwords.
Also, sites can and often do support multiple passkeys, which opens up the possibility of allowing for reliable account recovery using one or more backup devices (one or more YubiKeys, for instance) that is still siginificantly more secure than reset flows using SMS or email.
I think the point is I can make a physical copy of my backup email and password. How do I print a passkey for safekeeping?
In other words, my email can be signed in from anywhere on purpose. It's a feature. The chances of me forgetting my password is zero, because I can back it up 7 way to Sunday.
A passkey seems to miss these basic accessibility issues. For a random website, that's fine, but for the service all of websites use to auth me, access is more important than locking it down to one device.
Most Passkey implementations by default are syncable/copyable/backupable. The iOS default is iCloud Password Manager and keys get backed up to iCloud and restored on device restore when replacing a phone (just like the rest of the users passwords they choose to store). Android has similar defaults with the Chrome Password Manager.
That is my understanding as well but I like to point out:
The private ssh key lives on the hardware it was created on. It never leaves the system. Even root cannot "copy paste" that sucker around and chuck it into a password manager app or even "better" on a cloud service so you can use it on any device you log into.
I liked the idea that passkeys work the same way but now for logging into services like amazon or google etc.
Imagine my face when I learned that that so many interpretations of passkeys exist that actually create that private part in a passwordmanager or chuck it into iCloud or equivalents.
I wondered if the inventor of the private/public keyexchange still lives or if he would spin in his grave hearing what happened...
I would have been on board if the passkeys only existed on your hardware period.
I would have accepted that I would need to set up access from devices of my choosing and therefore cannot log into these services from any old "cyber cafe" on a whim.
But I would, as an emergency BCM measure, expect a sort of breakglass phrase that I could obtain and keep safe like at a bank deposit box or similar in case all hardware with keys to said service would die at the same time.
I understand though, that for most all this would look like way to inconvenient and using the cloud instead is so much more convenient which is why they decided to hollow out the concept of the passkey.
What’s PQ story with passkeys? Considering all the hype that everything needs to be pq safe by 2029 (or whatever), wouldn’t it make sense to delay adoption? Otherwise a db leak would compromise every single account in a pq world.
Authentication is safer than encryption, because harvest-now-decrypt-later is not available. Currently PQ is not standardized for passkeys, and at least Firefox fails if the authenticator advertises unknown algorithms.
Most Passkeys use PQ PKI algorithms. From statistics I've seen most are Elliptic Curve on currently recommended PQ curves.
For better and worse, Webauthn is one of the "choose your own adventure" PKI systems where the keys themselves suggest which PKI algorithm/details they use. This is partly because Webauthn has been around a long time and has had to backwards compatibly support a wide variety of physical security keys over the ages.
Most good open source libraries for implementing passkeys will do a good job of limiting passkeys to known good algorithm choices, including any PQ requirements/suggestions. The Passkey standard itself also sets a "higher water" baseline above Webauthn's supported algorithm list.
I don’t follow? What is a “currently recommended PQ curve”? As far as I understand, the entire point is that all ECC is broken by quantum computers, hence the hype to move to something else by 2029. Anyone that can see your public key can compute your private key.
My understanding is that some of the curves are still considered high enough entropy that the number of qubits needed is "unreasonable". The important point remains though that passkeys don't have a fixed encryption suite and can be updated over time.
Passkeys aren’t permanent, you can change or revoke them. If the algorithm used suddenly becomes vulnerable, you would need to rotate all your passkeys.
Sure. You’re assuming every site will revoke your passkey when that happens though. It also feels like a great time to trick people into registering an attacker passkey instead.
No, it absolutely doesn’t apply the same way to password. In a PQ world anyone that has your public key also has your private key. That’s not the case with a password and stolen hash.
Yeah, you are right. I don't know what I was thinking when I said that.
Little harsh to say I have NO idea what I am talking about, though.
I still don't agree that companies won't revoke their passkeys if we are in a PQ world.
If they don't, you are still in a better place than passwords. Each public/private key pair is unique for every domain, so a compromise in one place is not a compromise in others. Many people re-use passwords (even if you don't).
The article implies there are formulations included, mix up a new batch and compare? I know nothing about watercolor pigments, but the saturation remaining after so many years impressed me.
On the subject of mixing up a new batch, it is an easy thing to say, but often following old recipes can be tricky. What was once common and implied is no longer so. The missing context makes reproduction near impossible.
Update: I was looking at the full scan, and while I still can't read dutch, the picture in the article was cherry picked as a good example, many in the full document are very faded.
Except for egyptian blue, not known at that time
...
"Egyptian blue—the world's oldest known synthetic pigment, created nearly 5,000 years ago and lost to history after the Roman Empire—has been systematically recreated by modern researchers and historians."
You could add support for something like simplefin.org, which provides an API for connecting to many different financial orgs. It is what I have been using for my local setup with Actual budget.
Actual budget is good. Connectivity in Australia sucks though so I've kludged my own approach (open banking connections to a single local aggregator then puppeteer to sign in and get an access token, then directly calling the aggregators internal APIs with it and pushing the data into a local Actual server using Actual's APIs).
Well, there are multiple approaches, but here's one that worked well for me: when I purchased a home in the country where I now live, and the mortgage lender asked for a credit report from the (high-privacy) country where I lived the longest, what they got was a letter from that country's central bank listing the penalties for requesting that information. Up to and including jail time.
Suddenly the credit report was no longer a prerequisite to the mortgage.
Wouldn't this make credit riskier for lenders, reducing access to credit in general and thus making housing less accessible especially to working people?
Not asking polemically, I just have never studied economics and wonder if my intuition here is flawed
I think the actual trade-off is between average acceptable risk at society level.
Some societies prefer huge risks for huge benefits, in those one (might) need a more detailed credit reports because everything is faster, people accept huge risks and the situation can suddenly change.
Some societies prefer more stability. Lower risks, lower surprises. Less opportunities, everything is slower, people can't even take that many risks, simpler histories will do th trick.
From what I notice though, housing seems to be a problem in both types of societies, irrespective on how credits are given, because there are other things involved (regulation, NIMBY, housing used as value, airbnb, geography, etc).
That is rad. Is your high-privacy country friendly to immigrants? Asking for a friend...
But for real. You say you no longer live there, so I'm assuming you left for more opportunities. My wife and I are interested in countries with opportunities for engineers and privacy. Bonus points if there is engineering research opportunities.
You are so full of BS it's scary.
No credit report is a non-starter at any financial institution that wants to stay in business. They won't be giving you a loan unless they know you are wealthy e.g. own 17 investment properties already.
'High-privacy' countries is code for 'tax-haven', and 'my money in the Cayman Islands' means your bank is about to run afoul of AML and KYC laws if they give you a loan. And this is the whole world: doing business with America means adopting their financial posture i.e. penalties for doing business with money launderers.
It feels onerous as an idea because bank statements, monthly bills, payslips, will bequests, stock vests and trades, bank robberies*, and investment income each have different ways of being tracked. At least most of these records of individual financial activity come with a PDF these days. It wasn’t that long ago that applying for a loan meant scanning in papers for your lender to review.
Computers are smarter now. Not only can they read documents (or at least match the shapes against shapes they’ve been told are real) but they can also understand the contents too (or at least match the words against ideas they’ve been told are real.)
There may well yet be a future Data Valhalla where individuals hold their life.zip themselves, and upload whatever bits of it are needed to get that Nordstrom store card / car financing / cheeseburger loan without having an intermediate credit agency.
*I feel there’s a kernel of a joke there about a bank robber asking for a receipt with the loot in anticipation of declaring it on their tax return.
I don't see how this works in reality - The issue is that users wouldn't upload negative information (e.g. county court judgements or the bank robbery from your example).
Credit isn't like insurance where these things can be checked later during a claim (which can then be denied) - you need to know the person is a bad-payer before you send them the ten thousand dollar loan as that affects the terms, not afterwards when they default and you can't get your money back.
For CCJs and bank robberies, you'd upload a clean sheet from the government that gives a list of all CCJs and criminal convictions (in the UK we have a system called DBS for criminal records).
Potentially, with loans or other things, some kind of technical solution could work. You could have a personal document that you control, and you give permission for companies to write to the document.
With a loan, for example, if I give you a loan, I can also append to your document that I've loaned you the money; for every payment you make, I write to the log to say you've made a payment. If you stop making payments, I stop writing to the log. This would be cryptographically signed by me, so it can't be forged.
When you want to take out another loan, you can proactively share your document, the bank can see everything written on the log, and make a decision based on that.
Without some sort of central authority, surely this is just vulnerable to a rollback attack?
i.e. if I am a bad actor, and had just defaulted on a loan, why would the next document I send not be my copy of the previous 'clean' record before I got that loan?
Or what prevents me from sending out the same copy of the document to 10 other parties and getting 10 loans concurrently?
These are the sort of scenarios that the existing credit agencies prevent.
Then we follow it through and get to some sort of decentralised ledger to protect against these attacks, but that's then vulnerable to not being able to be expunged (how do we make sure it's possible to correct the record, as the CRA's are legally required to do when information has been written incorrectly).
So what. Maybe it is corrosive to society to provide unsecured credit willynilly. Yes, it makes the banks giant amounts of money, but IMHO consumer credit should only be a thing for two classes of assets (that can be repo'd easy-ish) real estate and vehicles.
The Western governments have horribly failed of caring for their people - cost of living are exploding, and at the moment way too many people are papering over that with unsecured credits backed by their data being free to exploit, and everyone else not willing of doing that is increasingly locked out of existence.
Naively, credit is if you can pay, and if you will pay.
For the latter it’s whether you’ve had a judgment against you, which is a matter of public record.
For the former it’s based on how much money you have and what you spend, including on servicing existing debt. Lying about this would be fraud. In that sense, my proposal does indeed open up a new avenue for fraud but I don’t think that’s the same as it being unworkable!
It typically required more direct sources of trust. If you were a grocery store, you might let customers you personally knew to be good for it, run up a 'tab' and settle on payday. If you were a bank, you might only lend to rich high-class people. You can find this all around the world today; the US is a standout for credit scoring and for access to credit. When a British person wants to sell their house, it has to happen on the same day that the buyer sells their old house, and the house they're moving into to be sold, and so on in a big same-day daisy-chain, until you hit someone who has enough cash for initial outlay. In Japan, up until very recently, you could expect your boss to need to co-sign your apartment lease (and your landlord to immediately escalate any disagreements to your boss).
> It typically required more direct sources of trust. If you were a grocery store, you might let customers you personally knew to be good for it, run up a 'tab' and settle on payday. If you were a bank, you might only lend to rich high-class people.
You hit the nail on the head with the first statement. It required humans in the loop. It scaled linearly. Local branch managers had relationships with the people in their community, and knew who could and couldn't be trusted.
It was an imperfect system, where a human could be prejudiced against another human, and deny them access to credit.
Sometimes that would get discovered, and the human was held accountable for their actions, or had their actions upheld by a (org-chart-superior) human.
Similar to the imperfect system today, where the models a computer uses could be prejudiced against a human, and deny them access to credit. Dissimilar in that the model or the computer is rarely, if ever, held to account. "Computer says no" is a meme for a reason.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, or do you honestly consider credit for fast food a good thing. I hesitate because I know that in America people buy everything with credit (or at least a lot), so it's possible some people think like that. But obviously not buying fast food with credit is a good thing?
Poor people couldn't borrow and middle-class people paid really high interest rates. Credit ratings are pretty much what enabled the expansion of availability to everyone.
Yes, and then in the interim we invented having a hundred trillion dollars in GDP. I prefer having access to credit and so does everyone who owns a credit card. If you own a house, you didn't have its cash value when you bought it; neither your car, nor (most likely) your education. In the days of no borrowing, we solved the problem with ramshackle one-room buildings with dirt floors, handcarts, and the one book whose distributors desperately wanted everyone to have it for free.
> If you own a house, you didn't have its cash value when you bought it; neither your car, nor (most likely) your education
When I grew up I was told to not make debts if not needed. So many older people did indeed save up until they could afford a car or a house. Education was always mostly free where I lived.
Nowadays it seems like ordinary people would need to pay off a house their whole life and thus also need to keep income high enough to keep paying installments. This takes away so much freedom from people as they are trapped in their high paying jobs...
The houses cost more because they are bigger. An American house is typically more than double the size of a British house. Credit allows people of the same means to live better.
> Yes, and then in the interim we invented having a hundred trillion dollars in GDP.
And every now and then we have to rescue banks that are too big too fail at the cost of everyone else, because someone dreamed up a way to increase short term profits that involves giving loans to people who will never pay them back.
> neither your car,
Praising a trillion dollar GDP, but can't afford a used car.
> I prefer having access to credit and so does everyone who owns a credit card.
A good number of European countries have only half the poverty rates - the dirt floors and carts you're talking about - of the US yet barely use credit cards.
> If you own a house, you didn't have its cash value when you bought it;
> we solved the problem with ramshackle one-room buildings with dirt floors,
there is a fallacy here. People with access to debt bid up the price of an asset, like a house, against other peoples’ similar access to debt. Sans debt access, the solution was not necessarily a small ramshackle house. The fallacy is the belief that the same asset price - whether opulent or ramshackle house, wouldn’t adjust to the reduced level from the bidding environment. The differential cost of construction for a nicer house can be countenanced in the access-to-debt case, but that is second order.
Illustrative straw-man example: Suppose, once one had a parcel of land, that it was trivial to construct one’s ‘starter home’ the ramshackle house if you like. Get one’s family and friends to help build in exchange for future return favors. As one advances in life, rebuild to have something more opulent. The rub is in the parcel itself. Unlike the would-be house, it had no cost built-in, just whatever price the previous owner was willing to accept to release their parcel. That parcel’s (and those around it) price reflects the market’s access to debt, or lack of access to debt. In the market without access to debt, parcel pricing reflects which buyers have accrued more savings vs other buyers. In the market with access to debt, parcel pricing reflects who can access more debt (through the various means we know of today - down payment ability yes, which parallels the non-debt’s savings case, someone co-signing, long term expected future earning potential vs someone retired, the parcel itself put up as collateral, perhaps other non-immobile assets put up as collateral, like the family oxcart).
The point is that there isn’t necessarily a 1:1 coupling between market’s debt vs non-debt access and whether the construction is opulent vs ramshackle.
> People with access to debt bid up the price of an asset, like a house, against other peoples’ similar access to debt.
That might be true now, but it would not mean house prices would go down, it just means more people would rent.
Think about how these loans work right now... people with money they don't need right now loan that money to people who want a house but don't have the cash right now. The reason they loan that money is they want to earn a return, which they get in interest on the loan.
Let's say all consumer lending is banned, and you can't loan money to people to buy a house. Well, the people with that money still want a return, so they will invest it somewhere else. Where can they invest it?
Well, one option is they could buy houses and rent them out. Since they only have to compete with other people with money (since poorer people can't get a loan for their house), the price is going to be much lower than it is today, which means they can get a better return by buying the house and renting it out.
So now you are still in the same situation with house prices, but there is no way for you to get any part of that return.
There are a lot of people in the world who weren’t part of that “we”, and they were often the ones who ended up lending money to the people who did think it was evil.
I don’t think there is any rational argument that ALL lending is evil (there are certainly many categories of lending that have lots of arguments for its evilness)
If we don’t have credit, then the only people capable of starting a business, for example, are those who are already wealthy.
You send them digitally signed statements from other lenders (who are legally required to give them for free with accurate info) or independent rating agencies, they evaluate them and make a decision. They can have their own model or license one from FICO.
That does mean banks can't know if you lie by omission and hide some unpaid bills, but they can raise the evidence requirements to compensate and I think everyone deserves a second chance.
Keepass people always in these topics with ”offline rules!! … now let me tell you how I use it with a copy on my phone and sync it with Dropbox and a backup on a git repo”
It should be something like, well, git (but likely not directly git): something that replicates easily, so that you'd have a remote copy accessed via internet ("hosted"), and local copies where you see fit.
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