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by SadWebDeveloper 1138 days ago
So in the event that i lost everything, i mean catastrophic, like my house burned to the ground with all my belongings, i have no kin nor "trust alternate people" configured for my account, my password manager requires my "synced in google/apple drive/cloud" passkey or my last known device, i can't retrieve it in anyway, how can i recover my account?

Either have to prove that m me to my account provider, which essentially is huge security hole since what data it will be required to prove might be more easy to fake (kinda like how people do sim swapping) and stole my passkey or do the "crypto thing", that if you lost your decryption key all your money is gone forever and ever and start fresh.

I mean my point is... password are not going to be deprecated, we had so many attempts to murder them but their convenience outmatch any other solutions, feels like passkey aren't well designed imho if the backup requires a password, then passwords won't be deprecated... maybe passkeys aren't meant to replace password but long-sessions oauth tokens if you ask me why passkeys exists.

1 comments

Sure. The idea of authenticating a human based on something you know, passwords, is still useful and not going to die anytime soon. But it would be a much much safer world if you only had to remember one or two passwords than if you had to try and get passwords right for every service you use out there. A single password protecting a keychain full of passkeys is still better than reusing that same password on every single site. Hands down no argument. This is why passkeys exist. They are objectively a superior technology and you are objectively safer using them, as long as you can comfortably recover from disaster scenarios. The fact that you might choose to still use a password to get access to your passkeys is, well, up to you. You're free to take whatever posture makes most sense to you. Someone else might "trust alternate people" and another might keep a printed copy of all their passkeys in a bank vault. But whatever you choose as your preferred recovery/bootstrap method, using that to get you to a per-site passkey world makes you safer than what you're currently doing using symmetric keys everywhere.