I am going to be giving some public talks about passkeys in the next few months. What questions do you have about passkeys and what topics do you want covered in me exploring passkeys?
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@rmondello 3) and finally, people have wrong concepts all over the place: I have made the experience that average people often …
a) either believe they know passkeys and are heavy users of them - while in fact they’re not and are just confusing passkeys with typical biometric auth on their devices.
b) or they say they have no idea what passkeys are (and don’t use them) and then you find out they already have 7 passkeys in their Passwords app ;-)
@rmondello besides that, since I am preparing a passkeys rollout project in a large company and have talked to many people about passkeys over the years and explained their advantages, I have noticed a few things:
1) it is incredibly hard to explain passkeys to average, non-technical people.
2) only explaining why they are better, is not enough: without actually understanding how things work, people get lost, the first time they leave the “happy path”…
@rmondello What is the roadmap/ plans to meet the demands of more “high assurance” scenarios (e.g. regulated industries like banks)?
I mean things like device-specific, supplemental passkeys (to mark trusted user devices) or support for secure payment confirmation (authenticator/browser displays WYSIWYS transaction data).
Imo, these are (besides user confusion, what passkeys are) some of the topics that are preventing a quicker adoption in regulated industries like banks…
@rmondello some web sites refuse to allow me to create a passkey with Firefox running on my Linux laptop. Is this actually a good security practice for them?
@rmondello I still regularly run into sites that don’t correctly recognize I already have a passkey saved. It usually takes a couple of tries.
Maybe talk about common pitfalls or what techniques I can use as an end user to figure out what’s going on.
How do you recommend sharing passkeys with family members?
@rmondello How do we get people to understand the difference between biometrically controlled passkeys vs persona-style biometric info harvesting?
@rmondello Is the ultimate plan to force passkeys on everyone? If not, how can I stop the passkey nagging that I didn't consent to?
@rmondello How to make it stop! I don’t mean this sarcastically or facetiously. I am happy using a password manager for now, and visiting Apple or Amazon or Microsoft requires hitting a ‘cancel’ or ‘no’ or ‘decline’ button 2, 3, or even 5 times. On *every single login*.
Perhaps more important, I have a Dad in his 80s and in-laws who are the same, and having *carefully* moved them from post-its to password manager over the last several years, it is terrifying for them to be harassed about passkeys with no way to shut it off.
They’re trying to do the right thing, but the implementation is so poorly done that it’s really stressing them out.
@rmondello When I lose my passkey, what happens? Show me real-world recovery paths for known big companies.
Where are they stored and how can I manage them?
@rmondello I would love this: "How to turn a Pimoroni Tiny2350 into a Passkey using all Open Source software and firmware".
@rmondello How can I migrate to a new platform without logging into every single site with my old system to setup passkeys with the new system?
Authy? 1Password? Ok… now what if I want to migrate to a new password manager?
@rmondello How do they handle the edges cases when everything isn’t perfect.
Say I’m on vacation, I break my phone and buy a new one. I need to login to get my data so I can get my plane tickets to go home. If my login is a passkey, then what?
I’m at a family member’s home using their copy of TurboTax and need to login to my bank on their computer to download my records, but I have a PassKey, then what?
If the answer is fall back to password auth, then what is the point of the Passkey?
Why is there such a huge variation in implementations? On macOS Safari, some websites just login with a single click, others make me authenticate with my Apple Watch, and yes others make me enter my mac user password. Also annoying is websites that prompt for a passkey when I’m not using one. It’s all more frustrating than convenient, in my opinion.
@rmondello how can we force companies to stop using them in addition to passwords during the login flow.
I have a passkey. I don’t want to use the password!
😒
@rmondello I realize this question likely isn’t one for a talk, but mine is: why the passkey for my Apple Account can’t be saved in Passwords or a third party app like 1Password?
That’s the one passkey I “have” that doesn’t live up to portability.
@rmondello why wont they stop berating me asking me to use pass keys.
@rmondello What can developers do to support the adoption of passkeys for most people and most use cases? App developers, web developers, infra and DevOps, but also at a higher and wider level like tech orgs, in slow-moving government orgs etc.
@rmondello can I use passkeys to authenticate in command line tools? Can a command line tool request a passkey from the user?
@rmondello how can a tech-savvy user use them without being locked into a single browser?
@rmondello does "passkey" refer to HSMs like Yubikey? Are they still a good brand? I got into HSMs years ago and then dropped out. I know I'm supposed to keep at least two in case i lose one
How do the kind of regular people that constantly lose/abuse their stuff seanlessly maintain access to their accounts, even when their laptop, keys, and cellphone are lost, broken, stolen, uncharged, etc.?
What about personal catastrophies like house fires and flooding?
@rmondello passkeys for AppleIDs — handling multiple IDs for things like personal, developer, client. Etc
@rmondello I don’t think one specific thing needs addressing but looking at the other replies, there is a vibe that needs to be contended with: in my experience most people’s impression of passkeys is “this is a trick that my phone and website vendors are trying to do to me, which will eventually lock me out when I lose my device”. address that central anxiety in as many different ways as you can
@rmondello I’m excited about passkeys, but I often see poor implementations deter users from using them. What’s being done to help companies implement passkeys “the right way”?
@rmondello What makes passkeys "better", and also, "better for whom"?
@rmondello what’s the best way to get buy-in from the average consumer/non-tech person?
How do we move forward as an industry to using passkeys as the single source of authentication and deleting passwords entirely from user accounts?
@rmondello The #1 thing preventing me from embracing passkeys today is my (possibly unfounded) fear about the backup situation. Currently I back up my Bitwarden database periodically to an encrypted drive that I keep in a safe. Is there an equivalent for passkeys? If not, what's the best practice on that for someone paranoid of somehow accidentally losing everything? (I'm sure you've answered this before somewhere, so sorry if so!)
@rmondello explain in simple terms how using a passkey delivers greater value to me, the user.
@rmondello if I'm already using a password manager, passkeys are basically an equivalent user experience. Are there reasons to use them anyway?
@rmondello
If you can access an account without a passkey using alternative methods is it not a bit moot as a security layer.
@rmondello if any are developer focused, definitely some kind of best practices guide for making using passkeys to login easier for users.
It’s so confusing to trigger the passkey prompt as a user, and I end up using passkeys less than half the time I could because the site doesn’t make the passkey flow easy to find - the fact that it’s separate at all is part of the frustration.
@rmondello what's a generally-accessible, single-sentence definition of what a passkey is?
(not explaining to the user why it's better, but explaining what it is, so they have a mental model)
@rmondello sometimes my fingers get too dry and TouchID stops recognising me which makes passkeys less joyful.
So my question is can you recommend a good hand cream or moisturiser?
@rmondello For me, the very basic. How is it secured? Is it standard? What are the implementations in free software? Why should I use them instead of TOTP?
how ready are passkeys for post quantum? I know in general asymmetrical crypto is said to be endangered, is it possible to "just" upgrade to post quantum or hybrid algorithms within the current implementations/protocol, or would a larger change be necessary? Or are they "safe" already?
I've seen people go back to passwords that are like 128 chars long since those seem to be safe from quantum, since they aren't used asymmetrically/with a "public key"
@rmondello making passkey UX user friendly. Most of the integrations with webauthn I know of make it hard to tell a) what is (not) happening when things go wrong and b) where the passkey went and sometimes even c) why there is a passkey if the user already had another auth method
@rmondello exports and more in the form: how to keep them alive and accessible when I lose my credentials (eg iCloud access), thus the option to export to another tool is important, but maybe a paper edition as a backup too?
@rmondello How do non-techies know to, and create, backups?
