Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hgyjnbdet 725 days ago
These articles never seem to mention the issues with passkeys asthey relate to Apple and other companies like them being in control of you account accessibility. What happens if you're device is list or stolen? What happens if that company decides you can no longer access your account with them?

I'll be using keepassxc and passwords until I'm forced to use passkeys and then I'll use passkeys in keepassxc. No way am I tying my accounts to one of more devices controlled by multinational advertising companies.

4 comments

> and then I'll use passkeys in keepassxc.

If the auth cartel deigns to allow it:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706876

Attestation makes passkeys inherently anti-user, full stop.

Gotta love how they are pushing full steam ahead for the technology and leaving export a to-be-solved problem. Oh, except the cloud vendors have full rights to backup our keys.
I keep hoping for a few senators and or EU officials to have their accounts locked and deleted so they'll pass some laws that make it harder.

Many modern countries have laws that landlords can't just kick you out of their apartment on a whim. Phone companies, Electric Power companies, natural gas companies can't cancel your account on a whim.

Companies that control so much of your life Apple, Google, or that have digital assets that you licensed (Steam, Sony, Amazon, Nintendo) need to not be able to cancel you so easily.

you can have multiple passkeys i passkey everything i can on ios and then also add my yubikey
> I keep hoping for a few senators and or EU officials to have their accounts locked and deleted so they'll pass some laws that make it harder.

When that happens you just ring your C-suite golf buddy from the offending company and have it fixed within the hour, right? Why would anyone have any issues? /s

This is exactly why I'm not using passkeys. I even trust Apple's statements that they can't view the key material, however, if Apple ever decides my account is no longer in good standing, I still want to access all my other accounts and as it stands now, you'd lose access to everything.
Passkeys are stored in Keychain which is stored locally and synced (unlike Sign In with Apple which requires an active Apple ID)
That helps a little, but it's still a big problem. In particular, consider the situation in which Apple deems you persona non grata, and then your iDevice starts getting old and unreliable. As soon as it dies, you'll be locked out of everything forever since you can't move your passkeys to a new device without Apple's blessing.
You do know that you can swap a passkey for another using a new provider?

It's not like if you create a passkey on a Google device, you're forever bound to Google.

Many sites stupidly only allow you one passkey or FIDO U2F key.
Isn't that like saying that password managers don't need to support exporting, since websites support changing your passwords?
Also shoutout to Bitwarden. Passkey doesn't have to mean lock-in.