[michaelt]

If you've already got a password manager, what benefit do you get from passkeys?

Avoiding the risks of short, weak passwords? The risks of reusing passwords across sites? The inconvenience of remembering loads of passwords? The frustration of having to type passwords manually? The risk of getting phished or typing one site's password into a different site? Remembering and typing usernames? The password manager takes care of all that for you already.

And if your objective is to have a second factor just in case your password manager gets compromised? A physical button just in case someone takes over your mouse and keyboard? Or a credential stored in a secure element that's (somewhat) protected even if you use it on a compromised machine? Putting it in a password manager (or OS keyring) removes those advantages.

[jorvi]

Passkeys can’t be phished, or shoulder peeped, or entered on a malicious domain. And for the layman, it means they can’t forget their password.

Technically the place where you store your passkeys can be hacked into, but there is no technology that protects against that. You could give a tech layman 5FA and he’ll give all 5 factors to the nice man on the phone call.

[masklinn]

> Passkeys can’t be phished, or shoulder peeped, or entered on a malicious domain. And for the layman, it means they can’t forget their password.

Neither can passwords if you’re using a password manager to handle them.

So again, if you’ve already got a password manager, and would put your passkeys in a password manager, what is the benefit of passkeys?

[pseudo0]

It cuts out the necessity for a password manager browser extension to handle stuff like autofill, password generation, etc. Those extensions have had fairly significant vulnerabilities in the past. So you're reducing the attack surface, as well as getting a cryptographic guarantee against phishing (the signature the client returns include the domain that sent the challenge).

Edit: The other great part is that the server just stores your public key, so it's idiot proof on their end. It makes a breach effectively useless, since offline cracking is impossible.

[nxicvyvy]

Except now you have vendor, browser and device lock in. So password managers are required to solve those very real problems anyway.

The value of these seem very low. Passkeys are a solution looking for a problem.

Mayve 10 years ago before password managers became a thing they made more sense? Now they're just kind of annoying and hard to share (sharing passwords is a real need for many people /applications / services)

[megous]

You don't need browser extensions to use a password manager. You can just copy&paste.

[Terr_]

Except we're talking about protections against phishing, and as much as I love the clipboard it will paste anywhere you like, including definitely wrong and evil places.

[ParetoOptimal]

I would just not use a password manager if I had to do that honestly.

[brabel]

You're wrong, with password managers you can definitely be phished. Unless it's literally impossible to extract the password to enter it manually, but I don't think password managers make that impossible (and if it's possible, users will do it).

With passkeys it's literally impossible.

[makeitdouble]

Could you expand on how to trick a password manager to enter the password on a fake domain ?

I'd see having the user add the domain themselves, or get the user to copy/past the password themselves on some other form. But the phishing is not happening on the password manager side, and these use cases still exist even after you chose passkeys (i.e. I'd still need to somewhat log into Google's auth from my Nest hub for instance to have it show the calendar)

[barnabee]

It happens to me very regularly that a password in my password manager is needed on a different domain. Maybe the logon process is at id.domain.com and password is pinned to domain.com, or maybe the password was created at signup.domain.com and so it doesn't pop up on domain.com, or you have to log in to a hotel's site with the password from their reward scheme (different domain), etc...

In any case users are trained by the internet to need to search for the right password outside the pinned domains. Most of the time I guarantee people don't add the extra domains to the password records. So when a phishing site pops up they'll do the same: search for the site name/domain that they think they're logging into and go from there.

Password managers solve password reuse, weak passwords, etc. but IMO do not solve phishing, especially not for the kind of user who's most susceptible t it (little technical understand, hates this stuff, just wants to follow instructions and not deal with it), but passkeys might.

[nightski]

At least on Bitwarden you can just edit the domain if that comes up a lot for you (or even add multiple domains to a password). I'd rather do that than copy/paste on a regular basis. Honestly I can't say I ever copy/paste.

[makeitdouble]

I'm totally with you.

These issues won't be solved unless passkeys work absolutely everywhere the user has to authenticate. Logon required or weird and funky domains is currently due to service providers being a mess themselves (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). So should we expect them to miraculously get their act together and have each of these system flawlessly work with their passkey auth. from now on ?

That's where I think we're stuck with that class of issue for as long as there are multiple auth systems, passkeys or not.

[mrmanner]

Also autofill is just broken by some sites and app login screens, so users are used to looking at and typing their passwords every now and then.

[forty]

There can be vulnerabilities, this is clearly the hottest attack surface of password managers. I remember a few years ago Tavis Ormandy from Google Project Zero found such vulnerabilities in a bunch of the most popular password managers which allowed to steal credentials from a rogue website.

I'd still recommend using a password manager, as overall and in practice the risk of phishing and (re)using (weak) passwords is far greater than this kind of rare vulnerabilities (and also I work for a company that makes a password manager ^^)

See https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html if you'd like to know more

[Aeolun]

> With passkeys it's literally impossible.

I dunno about you. But I like being able to get my passwords out of the password manager. How is not being able to do so a feature?

[mikestew]

The metaphor might be a bit esoteric, but that's similar to wishing that Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) allowed you "get your <private keys>" out of the HSM. As sibling comment says, that's how you get phished. The whole point of an HSM (and a passkey) is that the super-secret private part never leaves the HSM no matter how nicely you ask and no matter how compromised the machine is.

A password manager, OTOH, is happy to hand out your private key ("password" in this case) to anyone that has access to it.

[Atotalnoob]

Yes, but I don’t want vendor lockin.

I want to move my passkeys where I want and use tools I want.

Not allowing anyway of changing passkeys is terrible. Imagine someone switches from IOS to android. How do they use their passkeys?

Even if they had a big “warning don’t do this” sign it would be better than not allowing it in anyway.

[sowbug]

It's not that kind of impossible. It means that even if you are tricked into giving your passkey to the attacker, it's cryptographically useless to the attacker because a passkey is bound to a specific origin.

[brabel]

Because that opens you up for being phished.

[Aeolun]

True, but it also opens me up to using the same password on all machines I use. You can argue that’s a negative, but personally I like being able to add a new machine to my collection without worrying about who the vendor is.

[packetlost]

>> Passkeys can’t be phished, ..., or entered on a malicious domain. > Neither can passwords if you're using a password manager to handle them.

This is absolutely not true, it depends heavily on usage patterns of the password manager and its features. Not all are browser extensions that autofill, and even if they did, sites change their domains for auth occasionally that break this functionality (or more often, signup is on a different domain from auth) meaning you must manually copy-paste your password somewhat often if you don't meticulously, and manually, maintain your domain list for a credential. The average person is *not* going to do that, they're going to go "huh, it broke again" and copy paste their randomly generated password.

Please, do not give security advice you are not equipped to handle.

[troyvit]

> Passkeys have no easy way to extract the private key and do not request to enter the private key to authenticate.

Sure the do. All somebody needs is the password to your password manager. It's a single point of failure and by putting your passkeys in there to you've made it even more vulnerable.

Do you put a passkey on your password manager that exists outside of that ecosystem? Once you have that why not just use it for everything?

The parent wasn't giving security advice. They were asking a valid question.

[packetlost]

> Sure the do. All somebody needs is the password to your password manager. It's a single point of failure and by putting your passkeys in there to you've made it even more vulnerable.

Not more vulnerable than if they were just using password. You're still missing my point, password managers do not give you the ability to just copy-paste the private key of a passkey into a form field, unlike passwords. Some don't give you access to it at all (*cough* Apple *cough*). Sure you can get the private key if you have access to the password managers vault, but that's not what's being talked about. Common usage patterns matter immensely in security. At the end of the day, the attack surface for passkey-based authentication is smaller than password-based authentication, which is a step in the right direction.

> The parent wasn't giving security advice. They were asking a valid question.

The parent made a blatantly false and dangerous statement and then followed it up with a question. Did we read the same comment?

[troyvit]

I agree that it's not more vulnerable than just using a password, I'm only saying that it's only slightly less vulnerable under the best circumstances and incredibly more vulnerable under the worst circumstances (ie. if somebody got ahold of your password manager).

I also agree that passkey-based authentication provides a smaller attack surface than purely password-based authentication.

But putting the passkey on a second device provides an even smaller attack surface since now a bad actor needs both your device (or a MITM attack) and your password.

This is an HN forum. Nobody's giving "security advice," but I do feel like the parent comment's question hasn't been answered. Why would one store passkeys in their password manager instead of on a separate device?

[mid-kid]

Automation.

Password managers should be the default authentication method, and the current hack of having it type text into a password field is both unwieldy and completely avoidable.

[posix_monad]

Very easy to put the a password into the wrong place when doing it manually.

[javawizard]

The risk of your password getting stolen in between your browser and whatever hash algorithm the service you're authenticating with puts your password through before storing/verifying it.

That's the benefit you get from passkeys that no password manager will otherwise be able to give you.

[masklinn]

If your TLS connection has been MITM’d, you have much bigger problems than your unique randomly generated password being sniffed out.

[thinkharderdev]

It is not required that your connection has been MITM'd. The service you are authenticating can accidentally log the plaintext password, they can store it with an insufficiently secure hash function or not salt it. A malicious browser extension can scrape it directly from the input form. Etc, etc, etc.

Passwords are reasonably secure since we've been using them for a long time but there is in fact a huge chain of trust required to keep them secure and links in that chain frequently break.

[aragilar]

If the service is like that, then I'm not sure being able to log in as you is a major issue...

[hal0x2328]

It's very easy to fall prey to an Evilginx or similar AITM phishing attack. Passkeys or TLS client certificates are the only guaranteed defense. Relying on the user noticing the different domain or the lack of autofill by the password manager, not so much.

[knallfrosch]

If they control the information flow can't they simply steal the passkey too?

[tzs]

No, because they never see anything that needs to be kept secret.

Passwords are based on symmetric cryptography. When you log in to a site using a password you give the site your password in plain text, hopefully over an encrypted communication channel such as HTTPS so that no one between you and the site can see the password.

The site then takes that plain text password and decides if it matches the plain text password you gave them when you created the account or most recently changed your password. If the site is following good security practices they aren't actually storing a copy of the password in plain text. They will store a hash of it and compare a hash of the password you just send to see if the hashes match.

Passkeys are based on asymmetric cryptography, also known as public-key cryptography. When you set up an account at a site to use passkeys your device generates a public key and a matching private key. The site is given the public key and your device keeps the private key.

When you want to log in later the site sends your device some data, your device does a computation on that data that involves the private key and sends the result to the site. The site can recognize that whatever did that computation had access to the private key that corresponds to the public key the site has on file.

[manicdee]

The attacker could pretend to be the service the user is trying to authenticate to, issue a bogus challenge signed with the user's public key. That will allow intercepting the user's interactions but by this time the attacker has control over the target system so why not just take what is inside rather than go to the effort of interacting with the user?

[javawizard]

Nope.

Passkeys use public-key authentication wherein the server only stores the public half of a keypair and the client authenticates by correctly signing a challenge sent by the server, which the server then verifies using the public key.

At no point is the private key ever sent over the network or otherwise exposed to any infrastructure or code controlled by the server.

[afavour]

The actual implementation of password managers is really messy. Browser extensions that try to guess which field may or may not contain your username, copy the 2FA code to the clipboard in the hopes that you’ll easily be able to paste it on the next page… passkeys offering a standardized API to provide this information makes it worth considering alone IMO, even without considering the extra security compared to plaintext password.

[recursive]

These are all good things. Now, if I can just use it without getting locked into someone's walled garden, I'll be all-in.