- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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Missed opportunity for “What the eff is a Passkey?”
Thank you. That was the very first thing I thought.
You’re still entering the password or pin for your password manager. I genuinely do not see how this is better. It’s simply an alternative, not an improvement.
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Password managers are, generally speaking, far more security conscious than the average website. I’d rather send a password to my password manager a couple times a day than send passwords to every website I interact with.
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One click to confirm vs. 2-3 to autofill. Tiny gains in speed 🤷♀️ If you make a password manager even slightly more convenient than just using
gregspassword123for everything, you can onboard more normies.
Most people that have password managers are already using different passwords for each website. Usually randomly generated. What’s the difference between that and a passkey?
Right. Most people that have password managers. Making a password manager easier and more convenient to use means some portion of people who aren’t using one may start.
Realistically this is the biggest overall advantage.
Sure, there are minor advantages to people already using password managers, but that’s such a tiny minority of people…
A pass key is the private key in a private/public key pair. The private key is stored in the TPM on your device. The website contains the public key. When you use your “one password” you’re in effect giving your device permission to access the key storage in your TPM to fetch the private key to present it to the site.
What this means in practice is that if a website has a data breach they won’t have your hashed password, only your public key which… is public. It doesn’t and can’t do anything on its own. It needs the private key, which again only you have and the website doesn’t store, to do anything at all.
If you want to read more about it look into cryptographic key pairs. Pretty neat how they work.
When you use your “one password” you’re in effect giving your device permission to access the key storage in your TPM to fetch the private key to present it to the site.
Very small correction as I understand, but your private key is never presented. The web service should never interact with the private key directly. Your device is signing some bit of data, then the server uses your public key to verify that it was signed by your private key. Its a small distinction, but is one of the principal uses of asymmetric encryption is that the public key can truly be public knowledge and given to anyone, while the private key is 100% always only accessed by you the user.
Yeah, the TPM should perform the signature inside of the security chip, the key is always off limits from everything else
Passkeys use cryptographic keys held client side which are never transmitted, they user cryptographic challenge-response protocols and send a single use value back. You can’t intercept and reuse it unlike with passwords.
But does their advantage in security overcome the fact that they’re a much larger target?
It’s similar to how money under a pillow could be safer than money in the bank; depending on who you are.
In general, yes. Big sites get hacked all the time. Passwords from those sites get cracked all the time. Anyone who uses the same password on multiple sites is almost guaranteed to have that password stolen and associated with a username/email at some point, which goes on a list to try on banks, paypal, etc.
Conversely, to my knowledge, there has been one major security breach at a password manager, LastPass, and the thieves got more-or-less useless encrypted passwords. The only casualty, at least known so far, is people who used Lastpass to store crypto wallet seed phrases in plaintext, who signed up before 2018 when the more secure master password requirements were put in effect, chose an insecure master password, and never changed it once in the four years prior to the breach.
It’s not perfect, but the record is lightyears better.
Put it this way: Without a password manager, you’re gambling that zero sites, out of every single site you sign on to, ever gets hacked. From facebook, google, netflix, paypal, your bank, your lemmy or mastodon instances, all the way down to the funny little mom-n-pop hobby fansite you signed up for 20 years ago that hasn’t updated their password hashing functions since they opened it. With a password manager, you’re gambling that that one site doesn’t get hacked, a site whose sole job is not to get hacked and to stay on the forefront of security.
(Also, you don’t even have to use their central servers; services like BitWarden let you keep your password record locally if you prefer, so with a bit of setup, the gamble becomes zero sites)
I use a different password for every site tho. Using same pw for every site, that’s another extreme entirely.
Most people do not. The average user has one or two passwords, and maybe swaps out letters for numbers when the site forces them to. Because remembering dozens of passwords is hard. If you, personally, can remember dozens of secure passwords, you’re some kind of prodigy and the use-case for a password manager doesn’t apply to you, but it still applies to the majority.
One doesn’t have to remember dozens. Just a basic algorithm for deriving it from the name of the site. Complex enough that it’s not obvious looking at a couple passwords but easy to remember.
This method works for me. I understand its dangers (can still correlate. Dozen passwords and figure out the algo). But it’s my current approach. I hate even discussing it since obscurity helps.
Okay, I’m glad you have a system, but it’s not really relevant? I didn’t say you should use a password manager. I said it’s good for the majority of people who can only remember one or two passwords.
Your system is most likely way less secure than you think. I mean, possibly not since you’re here, but most schemes are trivial to solve even automatically.
…and that doesn’t really matter either, because so many people have such shitty passwords (and use the same ones everywhere) that noone really bothers checking for permutations when they have thousands of valid accounts.
But if truly enough people are convinced to be more secure your scheme may eventually become a target, too.
With passkeys (and password managers in general) the security gets so good that the vast majority of current attacks on passeord protection get obsolete.
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You’re entering your password into your password manager, which is stored by a company or entity whose entire job is to keep it secure. You’re not giving your password, in any form, to the website or service you’re accessing. When the website gets compromised, your hashed password is not in a database waiting to be cracked. All the attacker gets is a public key they can’t use for anything.
The biggest difference: nothing sensitive is stored on the server. No passwords, no password hashes, just a public key. No amount of brute forcing, dictionary attacks or rainbow tables can help an attacker log in with a public key.
“But what about phising? If the attacker has the public key, they can pretend to be the actual site and trick the user into logging in.” Only if they also manage to use the same domain name. Like a password manager, passkeys are stored for a specific domain name. If the domain doesn’t match, the passkey won’t be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNy_Q9fth-4 gives a pretty good introduction on them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=qNy_Q9fth-4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is something being sold in favor of passkeys but I can’t ser how “more secure” it is for me.
I use Bitwarden, the domain name matching works exactly like passkey’s. How more secure a passkey is, if it has 0 changes to this domain name detection?
That’s the part where the server doesn’t story any information that an attacker could use to log in. The attacker would need the private key, which is stored inside a secure chip on your device (unless you decide to store it in your password manager). All that’s stored server side, is the public key.
When you’re using a password, the server will store a hashed version of that password. If this is leaked, an attacker can attempt to brute-force this leaked password. If the server didn’t properly store hash the password, a leak simply exposes the password and allows the attacker access. If the user didn’t generate unique passwords for each site/server, that exposes them further to password spraying. In that case an attacker would try these same credentials on multiple sites, potentially giving them access to all these accounts.
In case of passkey, the public key doesn’t need to be secret. The secret part is all on your end (unless you store that secret in the managed vault of your password manager).
I do agree that your risk is quite small if you’re already
- using a decent password manager
- doing that the right way
- have enabled 2FA wherever possible
With a breach of the server then they can get your password the next time you log in and maintain persistent access until they’re both kicked out and everybody has changed passwords.
With passkeys you don’t need to do anything, they never had your secret.
If you’re using a hardware token like a YubiKey then you do need to enter your PIN before being able to use it.
The main benefit is that you cannot extract the Passkey from the secure element (the token cannot be transformed from what you have to what you know) and it cannot be phished through a fake domain as the challenge-response will not match.
Passkeys are asymmetric, meaning that the server only ever sees your public key. If the server gets breached, then only your public key is leaked, which isn’t a big deal. Functionally, it’s almost identical to SSH keys.
Since you should use a password manager anyways, it wouldn’t make a difference if they get a randomised password or public key.
If they get your password they can impersonate you to the server. They can’t do that with just the public key part of your passkey.
That’s true.
Ideally my password should be hashed and salted anyways, so that shouldn’t make a huge difference.
And all of my tech challenged family screamed out in unison, “What’s the fucking 1Password password again?!”
Wife: I don’t remember my {service} password.
Me: Did you put it in {password manager}? We have a family plan.
Wife: groans I never remember it. What’s the password?
Me: How would I know? It’s your password.
Wife: ruffles through desk, picks up tattered handwritten note. Aha! Here’s the {service} password. Same as {30 other sites}.
Me: slowly bangs head on table
[ Repeat once a month]
Sounds like you need to get the latest patch for your wife. While you’re doing that, you can add the password manager extension which should fix the issue.
Put your wife’s password in your password manager genius
Also write that password down somewhere in case you pass away in an accident or whatever. If you can afford it, a safety deposit box is great just because it can’t get lost but is also wayyyyyy overkill.
For this bitwarden has a solution: the emergency contact. You can designate an emergency contact that can request access to your account at any time.
If you don’t manually deny the request they can get access to your bitwarden passwords after X days (X can be configured)
Password managers are also updating to allow login with passkeys. I would give each family member a physical key that unlocks the rest. Since there are multiple, someone losing one isn’t a big deal and access can be revoked.
Because you don’t send a secret value, you only send a cryptographic asymmetric single use value which is safe to disclose
Because it’s for your website logins. It just stores the key and auto logins.
Someone on slashdot correctly pointed out that these are only single factor on the server end. You enter a pin to unlock the device, the server can check if the device says you unlocked it, but there is no sending a second factor to the server. If a device was hacked to get the keys, or just says to the server that you presented a pin but didn’t really, the server has no clue. Passkey + TOTP would be multi factor on the server side.
TOTP generated on the same device as the passkey is not a secondary factor. It will have been compromised together with the passkey.
For passkeys, the secondary factors are used to access the passkey vault, not auth to the server. And these secondary factors should be a master password, biometrics, or physical keys. TOTP and SMS are out.
I understand how it works, but again, it is not two factors being used to authenticate to the server.
It is a single factor being used to access the vault. The server has no way of confirming this actually happened, the device just tells the server it has happened. A single factor is then used for authentication. This seems especially worth knowing since most cell phones deliberately weaken the security by sharing them between devices.
Passkeys would preferably not be stored on the same device as a secondary factor used for authentication. Hardware tokens have supported them for years at this point, they can also hold TOTP keys instead.
I’m not sure I follow you - if someone can compromise the key material on my phone that is protected by a different factor, then it doesn’t matter whether the 2FA is server-side or not, it’s compromised either way.
If they compromise key material on your phone they still cannot get into whatever you are authenticating to, because it uses a completely separate factor that should not be on your phone.
It seems like you are trying to protect against a compromise of the user’s device. But if their device is compromised then their session is compromised after auth anyway and you aren’t solving much with extra auth factors.
You’re assuming that the passkey is on their phone and the phone is compromised. Passkeys can also be stored in password managers, or hardware tokens, or people’s iCloud or Google accounts. And if someone’s device is compromised, they have keys to everything even if the user never logs into those services to grab session data. If someone compromises my password vault they get passwords, but not TOTP keys. If they compromise my vault that is holding passkeys, that is all they need.
I am only pointing out that a single factor is all that is sent to the sever, with most no longer allowing a secondary factor for authentication, and all of the security is all dependent on the client-side now.
If the user can perform all steps on the same device then it doesn’t make sense to assume only specific set of keys will be disclosed, you have to assume everything on the device can be compromised
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The second factor doesn’t necessarily exist, since you’ve moved all of that to the client side now. It entirely depends on implementation and that the implementation is done correctly and is honest. The server only knows that you have the key, it’s single factor authentication.
In the past, it verifies that I know the password and that I have a key on the server side through separate challenges.
It’s still way better than username / password, it just has new (more difficult) vulnerabilities.
This is where PAKE algorithms for secure password checks fits in
Passkey plus TOTP doesn’t really make sense (they’re both client side cryptographic keys, you don’t need two protocols), at least use a PAKE algorithm with a PIN instead if you want the server to be able to check the user’s knowledge of a secret without sending it in a readable form
Yubikey ftw
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Which I would lose in a time period so short it is not yet measurable by science.
Hopefully you don’t open the door to your house with a key lol
Think we have five of them taped to the wall at work.
Glassless breakglass :)
FYI Yubico (who makes them) have devices compatible with each. You can technically use the passkey standard with a yubikey security key since it’s all FIDO2 protocols, but it’s certainly not standard
It’s just a question of device bound keys (the default for yubikeys) vs platform / exportable keys (passkeys), but the websites can’t tell the difference if you don’t tell it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
RIP local sexpot.
something from a corporation that cannot be trusted?
Except passkeys are an Open Authentication standard from the FIDO alliance. Soooooo, not from a corporation.
https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/
You can use passkeys in KeePassXC, if I understand correctly.
They are the equivalent of using a hardware key like YubiKey or SoloKey, except the passkey is stored on your phone/PC instead of a USB thumbstick.
still no reason to trust google with this.
they have hijacked and dominated open source software quite a bit in the past.
Except Google was only mentioned in terms of whether or not they support it.
You’re commenting on an article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting for internet and digital freedoms, about an open standard that has only just begun being implemented widely.
Look, I hate corpos as much as anyone, but please let’s please tone down the alarmism.
I’d like to thank you for providing context to reactivism based solely on an emotional reaction without doing any research first.
I am guilty of that as well, but you put effort in, explained things and that takes time. Thanks.
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Damn I was wondering exactly that a few days ago. Once again lovely job from eff to clarify here.
