[dontTREATonme]

My first experience with passkeys was eBay. They implemented them 3-4 years ago, and my password manager, Dashlane picked up on it. They offered to save it and I wouldn’t have to enter a username or password. Great, seemed to work. Until I needed to login on another device and then Dashlane saved that passkey too, but each passkey was tied to the specific device… only it wasn’t clear when I logged in which passkey I should choose, and chose the wrong one and it doesn’t work. After having like 6 different passkeys for eBay I gave up. Now I always decline to use passkeys. They don’t work, idk who uses them but as a fairly tech savvy user, without a very complex setup (chrome, with Dashlane installed) if it’s not working for me it’s probably just not working.

I’ll also add. I don’t have a good mental model for what a passkey is or how it works. And again, like most users if I don’t really understand what’s going on I’m just not gonna bother with it. For all the complexity that it takes to implement secure login with a username and password, most of it is hidden from the user, with passkeys it feels like they’re shoving all the complexity front and center, but not explaining any of it.

[_Algernon_]

The only way passkeys make sense is in terms of vendor lock in. If you stick with a single vendor (ie. Google or Apple) to manage them for you, it kinda works if you ignore edge cases (eg. how to recover if phone breaks).

So the motivation for why big tech wants them is clear. They've just not managed to make a compelling case for why anybody else should want them.

The only way pass keys become a widespread thing is if they force the issue by removing password authentication, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

[diggan]

> The only way passkeys make sense is in terms of vendor lock in.

This is what I've figured as well, and even if my password manager claims "eventually we'll support it, once it's available" (https://blog.1password.com/fido-alliance-import-export-passk...), I've been putting it off until the implementation is actually in place.

But the question is when that'll be. Last I've heard about the whole "Risk of lock-in from export blocking" is:

> The general vibe is supportive and language has been added to this effect, though it looks like we haven't done a public working draft in some time so I don't think that's externally visible yet. Also usual caveats about in-progress work subject to change.

https://github.com/fido-alliance/credential-exchange-feedbac...

I guess time will tell. But for now, considering the history of lock-in on the web, it's best to stay away from Passkeys for now, until they figure out a proper way of avoiding it.

[signal11]

This so many times. The cryptography around passkeys is great. An operational consequence that a lot of people seem to miss is lock-in.

I know passkey vendors will say they’re working to make interoperability easier in 2025, and that’s true. Equally the number of users who’ll take advantage of this interop will be a rounding error. The net effect will be even more platform entrenchment.

[hshdhdhj4444]

> if you ignore edge cases (eg. how to recover if phone breaks)

I really see this language around passkeys a lot.

How is losing your phone, phone breaking, etc considered an edge case?

It’s common enough that Apple has a whole app called Find My.

Phones falling into toilets led to a whole meme about putting them in rice to fix them.

And even before Find My existed as an app Apple had equivalent functionality available online within a couple of years of the iPhones introduction.

[noirscape]

> The only way pass keys become a widespread thing is if they force the issue by removing password authentication, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

I mean, that's what Microsoft is doing here, no? They're changing their password manager to only accept passkeys, not passwords and to block off autofill functions. Granted, right now they're the only vendor to do this, but that's a pretty risky precedent to create.

[xlii]

For myself it’s a very good secondary auth in alternative. E.g. I register with a vendor, create strong password in password vault and then create a passkey.

Passkey is convenient for log in (and also - quick) but worst case scenario I still have passwords. I wouldn’t trade in passwords completely but I prefer passkeys to OTPs.

[egberts1]

THIS!

Worth my point for this emphasis.

Can concur.

[brazzy]

Passkeys absolutely make sense from a security (and in theory also UX) POV. Handling logins for dozens of services is either very insecure (reuse), has even worse vendor lock in (federated ID), or has pretty bad UX (password manager).

In practice, unfortunately the UX gains are not realized because interoperability is unsolved, because vendors have little motivation to solve it and eliminate the lock in.

[karel-3d]

I like this part from Register article

> When I click “add key,” three different bits of software compete for my attention.

> First up is the password manager, offering to store a passkey. (This is the first time passkeys have shown up in this process – you can begin to see how a casual user might be getting confused.) I don’t want the password manager to be involved in this case, so I dismiss the window.

> Next up, a window appears from macOS asking me if I would like to use TouchID to “sign in” (to what? – I am already signed in to the website) and to save a passkey. Again, note the different terminology. When I dismiss that window, it is time for the browser to have a go, offering me four ways to save a passkey, including finally the option to store it on the hardware token. I insert the USB key and proceed.

> I think we can all agree that this is a confusing experience, with three different systems fighting to be the One True Place To Store Passkeys, along with the inconsistency of terminology (passkeys or security keys) and use cases (password replacement or strong second factor?)

> It’s like every piece of software wants to “help” but there is noone looking at the system-level behavior where these different bits of software interact with each other and the end user. I’ve encouraged my wife (a social scientist not a computer scientist) to adopt a password manager and 2FA, and she’s very willing to follow my lead, but the confusion of terminology and bewildering arrays of options frequently (and understandably) leads to complete frustration on her part.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/17/passkeys_passwords/

[dcow]

I’ve been in charge of a 3rd party authenticator passkey implementation twice and both times the platform (be that chrome or apple) unfairly leveraged their position to push their solution above 3rd party options. Apple, in its most recent update, finally allows the user to disable iCloud keychain so it’s not an option always getting in their way if they use something else like 1pass or bitwarden. Chrome still puts themselves first before allowing the user to see the list of “other” authenticators to use, which isn’t serviceable as an other.

[lucumo]

> Until I needed to login on another device and then Dashlane saved that passkey too, but each passkey was tied to the specific device… only it wasn’t clear when I logged in which passkey I should choose, and chose the wrong one and it doesn’t work.

I'm not sure if that has changed since years ago (when you last tried), or that that is a Dashlane thing. In any case, that's not how it is now. I've stored them in 1Password. I can use them on any 1Password-enabled browser, and on my Android. They're slightly easier than password flows, and much easier than MFA flows.

> I’ll also add. I don’t have a good mental model for what a passkey is or how it works.

It's a public and private key-pair. You keep the private key, the server gets the public key on registration. When you login the server sends a challenge. "You" encrypt it with the private key and send it back. The server uses the public key to verify and boom, you're logged in.

[scrollaway]

I remember being a kid on the internet 20-something years ago, understanding how passwords worked, and thinking the whole of the internet must be crazy for accepting a "pinky-promise we don't store that secret password you're sending us in plaintext, let alone use it for nefarious purposes" as the status quo.

I then discovered SSH and how it worked, asked in some public forum why there isn't a way to log in to websites using an ssh keypair, and was ridiculed for it.

Ah well, glad times change.

[hedora]

That’s a poor mental model for how it works.

If it was just a private key that I had, then import/export would be trivial.

[wavemode]

Perhaps eBay themselves were restricting use of a given passkey to a specific device

[AJRF]

I have a degree in computer science, 10 years experience in some complicated fields and I can’t figure out PassKeys.

They are woefully designed and implemented, wish we just cut our losses with them and stopped pushing them.

Tuck them away in settings, not on the default login path.

[kjuulh]

I felt the same when implementing OpenID connect flows according to spec. It uses the browser in creative ways ;) Especially the device flow, absolutely insane complexity for what it is.

[tallanvor]

They're just public/private keypairs that are generated either by a device (whether it's part of you phone, computer, or hardware key), browser, or password manager. I do agree that it can be a bit of a pain when it comes to multiple managers trying to offer to save/respond to a passkey, but otherwise it's a fairly straightforward exchange.

[escapecharacter]

CVS keeps pushing them for their pharmacy login. So annoying.

[sydbarrett74]

Agree. The UI/UX is atrocious at present. The concept has flaws, but IMO it substantively raises the floor security-wise.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Glad to know I'm not alone. My story is more or less the same (except without password manager). One day I was logging into my ancient Yahoo mail account that I use mostly for unimportant/throwaway things and spam, and I was offered a passkey. I accepted. Next time I logged in I was in a different computer (I regularly use 4-5 computers apart from my phone) and it didn't work. Later, in the original computer, it didn't work either... I guess because I updated something or whatever, no idea, I didn't bother to find out. I'm back to the password now, after having logged in successfully with a passkey exactly zero times after setting it up.

I also don't have a good mental model of how passkeys work. I could get informed. But why should I bother? I'm a busy person. Passwords have worked for me for more than 25 years, and passkeys seem much more fussy and inconvenient (what if I'm traveling and connecting from a random computer in an hotel/airport? I imagine I'll be expected to do something with my phone, as modern cybersecurity seems to be based on trusting everything to the phone -if it gets stolen, bad luck- but what if I have no battery?). I guess I'll have to find out if they force them on us, but if I (a CS PhD and professor) have to actively find out in order to use them, it's going to be chaos with regular users.

[ajdude]

I hate passkeys, only because it seems like every few months I'm trying to help ream them out of my grandmother's computer because she can no longer login to her yahoo email. I've told her countless times, stop saying yes for passkeys but she somehow inevitably gets them enabled on everything while on her desktop and then can't figure out how to access it from her phone.

[teekert]

I think Proton Pass just stores one key for all devices? Not even sure! But it does work anywhere without the experience you had: I go to a website I have saved, it pops up, I click and am logged in.

Not sure if Proton does the device specific stuff under the hood (and hides it well), or if they are abusing the system by simply sharing the private key over all devices? (That is misuse right? Idk, I had the same experience with BitWarden). The keys should be device specific right? That's the 2fa replacing magic.

I too, have no idea. And I too am a bit disappointed it is so difficult to understand what happens. I do believe I can just export the keys and import somewhere else (i.e. Proton <-> BitWarden), which would suggest one passkey per account... Hmmm... Also, I believe it's just Google and Apple that try to make this a walled garden, it wasn't designed to be like that.

[dchest]

> The keys should be device specific right?

No, they can be synched. There are different types of passkeys, synched and device-bound (for YubiKeys, etc.)

Hope this clears up the confusion (haha).

[djvdq]

I don't have this problem. I'm using passkey probably on only 1 website (github) but it's working without any issues on all my devices. Maybe it's a password manager issue? I'm a bitwarden user

[qwertox]

Well you have your passkey stored in Bitwarden, which may weaken its security, since it's a software-only solution.

The idea of passkeys is that they are supposed to be tied to a hardware device. And this leads to very odd situations, like Chrome asking Windows to authenticate, and Windows having to ask for the passkey on an Android phone.

I migrated to Bitwarden around 3 weeks ago and now Chrome is no longer asking Windows to authenticate, but Bitwarden. But then Bitwarden doesn't have the passkey, so it will offer to delegate to Windows, which will in turn reach to the Android phone, unless it's one which is stored in Windows.

This are the kind of problems which arise, and for a 75 year old senior who never dealt with all this crap, this is nothing but a huge annoyance, because they simply don't understand what's going on. It was easy with username and password.

What I liked the most was username+password and a Yubikey for OTP. And for what can't or no longer wants to deal with Yubikey, I've moved to app-based OTP. And now I'm starting to get forced to move to passkeys, which annoys me a bit because things are no longer so clear.

[ExoticPearTree]

Looks like a Dashlane problem from what you are describing.

Since I use a Mac, I will refer to my MacOS experience: Keychain and now Passwords will sync passkeys via iCloud to any other device. The end result is that you only have one passkey. Pretty seamless experience.

[jlokier]

I have a Macbook and an Android phone, as do many people.

Can I still have a seamless experience with passkeys, or have they made that difficult? Do I need to remember to reject the dialog offering to save keys on Keychain and learn to use a 3rd party passkey service?

What am I supposed to about all the passkeys that will be needed at my multiple jobs, which I access from my own Macbook and phone? Can I use a single service, ideally open source, or do I need to use several "passkey sharing & backup managers", one for each entity and one more for my personal keys?

[avhception]

There is no way I will sync all of my credentials onto other peoples computers.

Trust issues aside, is there a way to get those passkeys out of there?

Suppose you want to switch from iCloud to whatever else, can you export and import those passkeys?

[eviks]

So you're locked into Macs for this seamless experience

[N_Lens]

Yeah I'm on Mac/iPhone as well and was scratching my head at the "multiple passkeys" comment.

[encom]

>any other device

Any other Apple™ device.

[ashdksnndck]

Nowadays I use the passkeys with my password manager and everything works across multiple devices. I’ve never been presented with a list of passkeys to select from.

[sydbarrett74]

I’ll second this. A combo of KeePassXC (desktop), KeePassium (Apple), and KeePass2Android plus manually synching my .kbdx file makes the passkey experience relatively smooth for me.

[rafaelmn]

I think your problem is Dashlane. I had to use it for one corporate gig an oh my god was it the worst password manager I used - UX and stability wise.

[wenc]

> I don’t have a good mental model for what a passkey is or how it works. And again, like most users if I don’t really understand what’s going on I’m just not gonna bother with it.

Sites kept asking me if I would like to setup a passkey, and I didn't have a good mental model for what it was either.

Turns out it's like PGP of the 1990s -- public/private key but for auth instead of email encryption.

Public/private key is not the of easiest ideas for a lay man to understand (though some YouTube videos explain it well).

All users want to know is that it keeps their information safe.

Like modern credit cards -- they use public/private keys, but the messaging is "your credit card number is kept safe," not this is based on PKI.

[jbverschoor]

Exactly my experience. The mental model is easy once you understand that it’s just a key on your device/app.

It’s just really hard to wrap around your head that this is the actual implementation with so many drawbacks given most people have 2+ devices, and different OSes to provide it.

I won’t use them.. although I’d have loved to use them.

When they worm they work, but I can’t trust them completely, so what’s the point? There’s no difference with a password, except that the sign-in process can be streamlined when everything works

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I suppose they refer to a more detailed mental model. For example, I know that it's a key in my device, but I don't have a detailed enough model to know if it will work if transferred to another device or stored in the cloud, or what I'm supposed to do at a cybercafe/hotel/airport/borrowed computer. So my mental model is not good enough. With passwords, the answers to questions like that are obvious.

[kd5bjo]

> There’s no difference with a password, except that the sign-in process can be streamlined when everything works

There is one other major difference behind the scenes: With passkeys, the service you’re logging into never has enough information to authenticate as you, so leaks of the server-side credential info are almost (hopefully completely) useless to an attacker.

[stavros]

If you think there's no difference between a password and a passkey, that kind of tells me you don't really know a lot about passkeys, so it makes sense you'd think they're just worse-implemented passwords.

[jeroenhd]

That's not a passkey problem, that's Dashlane being very weird about passkeys. There's no way that isn't a bug.

[richardw]

Interesting. I’m only a user of them but not had one second of trouble. I save them on my device in the native saving place (iOS/mac) and it just works. I didn’t know this issue existed and I’d like to avoid it. Is the issue when you save them in a password manager?

I have Bitwarden for personal and now 1Password for work, so might hit the issue at some point.

[romperstomper]

As far as I understand the passkey are not to be intended to sink across devices. They unlock private keys stored on device and these keys are used for authorization on web sites etc. At least this was my understanding when last time I tried to grok passkeys :)

[dale_huevo]

The downfall of passkeys is that - as was inevitable - they are horrifyingly implemented webshit.

For example, nearly every visit to my Amazon orders page I am now greeted with a nearly full screen modal browser popup letting me know about passkeys and why I should switch to them RIGHT NOW. I politely declined - the first thousand times. I don't know if this is a site or browser issue and frankly I don't care anymore. It's spam at this point and I want nothing to do with it.

My hesitancy was rooted in concerns about potential issues pretty much what you just described so glad to know I was right.

Seems like passkeys use a very simple model where you are using a single device with a single browser or are somehow syncing across devices with some cloud service - and from your description it sounds like that doesn't even work.

No thanks - I'll stick with passwords. Did everyone forget about hardware tokens which are device and OS-independent and rely on no external infrastructre?

[littlecranky67]

Don't forget that a per-device passkey is the wet dream of any $MEGACORP wanting to track your habbits. Which is another reason why it is a no-go for me.

[nasso_dev]

> Seems like passkeys use a very simple model where you are using a single device with a single browser or are somehow syncing across devices with some cloud service - and from your description it sounds like that doesn't even work.

Unlike passwords, you can have multiple passkeys per account. You can have 5 passkeys for your amazon account if you use your amazon account on 5 different devices. If you lose device 4, or if it gets stolen, you can just delete passkey 4. The other ones are safe.

Or, you can use a syncing service like a password manager. Both solutions work!

[hazmazlaz]

That's just a problem with how Dashlane and/or eBay implemented Passkeys. I have tons of site passkeys (1 per site) saved with 1password and use them across multiple devices just fine.

[jorvi]

That is very rarely how passkeys work.

You chose a worst case example and are comparing it with your best case example.

Virtually all sites have one passkey, tied to your vault of choice (Apple, Google, 1Password, etc). You make one, and you can use it everywhere.

Passkeys are a blessing for your regular Joe. No more easy phishing, and no passwords to forget. Often even no username to forget.

Apples-to-apples, passkeys rock.

[probably_wrong]

> Passkeys are a blessing for your regular Joe.

I've had two regular Joes come to me because Google locked them out of their accounts (plus a third one with Apple) and they had important emails they couldn't get to. The "solution" in all cases ended up being a total loss and starting from scratch.

Now when Google locks them out of their account with no recourse (or, more likely, when their phone dies without backup) not only do their lose their email, but also every other service they ever signed up for.

Passkeys may be better when everything works right, but password managers are miles ahead when something goes wrong.

[dcow]

FWIW you’re supposed to use one passkey synced across your all devices where your PW manager (Dashlane) is installed. The fact that Dashlane let you so easily do the wrong thing might be an issue of their early/unrefined support for passkeys.

[navigate8310]

I use Bitwarden on every device, it saves exactly ONE passkey per service. No more fiddling it passwords and some services don't even want to bother with your username as well. Just one passkey prompt and login happens seamlessly.