Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap | Proton
Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap | Proton
Big Tech companies want to chain your passkey to their products. Enter Proton Pass, which allows you to manage and use passkeys across all devices seamlessly.
- Big Tech has implemented passkeys in a way that locks users into their platforms rather than providing universal security
- Passkeys were developed to replace passwords for better account security, but their rollout by Apple and Google has limited their potential
- Proton Pass offers passkeys that are universal, easy to use, and available to everyone for improved online security and privacy.
You're viewing a single thread.
what are passkeys? like biometrics fngerprints or facisl recognition you mean?
Passkeys are a way of doing public/private key-pair crypto to prove that you are in possession of the private key that corresponds to the public key that was registered with a site or service when you added the passkey to the account. The use of the passkey is often protected by biometrics like the fingerprint or facial recognition systems on your device but it doesn't necessarily need to use biometrics at all if you don't want to and you can instead use a passcode to unlock your device or password/passkey manager.
Basically instead of the normal way with passwords:
- You ---password---> website
- Website verifies password matches, either directly to an actual stored password (bad) or through a hash they have stored
With passkeys you have:
- You <---challenge--- website
- You sign the challenge with a private key that only you have
- You ---signed challenge ---> website
- Website verifies that the signed challenge corresponds to the public key you provided when you set up the passkey
In the password scenario, the website could be following best practices and hashing the password or it could just be storing them directly and insecurely. You have no idea what really goes on inside their systems. This also means that due to reused passwords, a security breach at one site can mean problems for other sites, even if they didn't do anything wrong.
In the passkey scenario, you're not sending anything particularly sensitive to each site so it's more secure.
If I use a password manager with long random passwords, and use 2FAS to generate those 6-digit two factor authentication codes whenever possible (as opposed to SMS/email 2FA), is there any advantage?
Is it just that you don't actually have to type anything, just press "I approve" on your phone after entering your username?
Or is it more just designed to improve security for people like my family members who use the same ~10 digit passwords for everything?
It's definitely trying to be user friendly enough that non-technical users like the family members you mention can use it to replace passwords. For your use case with a strong password and 2FAS to generate a code, it still gets rid of the phishing potential. The main advantage for the other people like your family is that they don't have to type or autofill anything, just select an account to log into or click approve on their phone. A main advantage for the service is that the user's diligence is taken out of the equation for a lot of it and they don't have to worry about a user giving their password and 2FA codes to a phisher. If a user tries to use a passkey at the wrong site (like a phishing site), it won't pop up as an option to select because the domain is wrong.
Passkeys can also help anyone who is using a service in an indirect way. The 23andMe "breach" was due to stolen credentials from other actually breached sites being used to log into accounts that have data shared with them. That 23andMe data was shared to those compromised users by people who may have actually had all their security turned up to the highest settings like 2FA but was nonetheless scraped and obtained by the bad actors anyways. If 23andMe had been using passkeys (or even magic login links in an email), there would have been no credentials from other sources to use against their 23andMe's users. Moving everyone to more secure authentication methods is in the best interest of everyone involved, it's just that typically it was a hassle to have to setup an authenticator app or a password manager for 2FA. Passkeys, when everything is working properly, finally provide both more security and more convenience for the average person than just a password and so people might actually adopt them.
No, it's like a security certificate to authenticate. It's a secret that your key vault presents to the site to validate that you're who you say you are.
like an encryption key? or cookies? I'll try to look up how they work
They’re the private half of a public/private key pair, much like how you make encrypted connections to websites.
The gist of passkeys are that the secret you’re using to login to your accounts is stored on your device (Or in your password manager) and is never sent to or stored on the server. So if a website you have an account on is breached, unlike with a password, your passkey can’t be stolen, because they don’t have it.
Similarly, your passkey can’t be phished. If a malicious actor directed you to a fake login page and you didn’t notice and entered your password into the fake login form, they now have stolen your password. But because your passkey is not sent to the server like a password, the fake login page wouldn’t get anything.
And because your passkey isn’t something you have to remember, you can’t create an insecure one like with a password, and you can’t reuse the same one for different accounts.
I can wrap my head around the secret being stored in your device, but what happens when you go to a different device?
Let's say for example, I am at my friend's house, and for one reason or another, I don't have my phone. My Gmail account is passkey locked, but I need to check my email from my friend's laptop. Would that require that I install passkey on their laptop, and log in to my passkey account? Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account? If that's the case, what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey? What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
I am all for more security and less password remembering, but I hop around a lot of computers.
Let’s say for example, I am at my friend’s house, and for one reason or another, I don’t have my phone.
If you need to log into your friend's laptop to check your email, you would need your phone or some other passkey you had set up for your account, yes, as long as that was the only login method you have setup on your account. If you don't have your phone, you might not be able to pass the two-factor steps or account login location checks many accounts. If Google finds the new login attempt suspicious for some reason, it will ask for additional checks like a code sent to your email or through a text and you may not be able to log in with just the password anyways. Just because you have the right username and password, it doesn't mean that a service may let you log in without access to some kind of other trusted information accessible on an existing device.
Overall though, think of it like forgetting your physical keys.
Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account?
Yes, the same as if you had left your physical keys there and those keys provided access to all your accounts. There may be some technical protections like the timeout until it locks on a password manager but that's up to the password/passkey manager app to implement and for the OS to guarantee the security of. It's no different from loading up your password manager on the device. If you don't trust the device or the owner of the device, you should not access your password/passkey manager on it.
what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
The same thing that happens if your password manager is compromised: you secure it (rotate encryption, create a new database, however you want) and then you set about updating new passwords and passkeys for your accounts. That's why it's recommended to only have your actual password/passkey manager on something you trust (your phone, your computer, etc) and use that device as the passkey for whichever other device your logging into rather than loading up your password/passkey manager on each device you're logging into.
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey?
It's a form of WebAuthn credential most likely, yes. Passkeys aren't actually entirely new in how they can be used with accounts, the standards have been there for a while now. It's mainly just a unified marketing from the big players as well as developing an ecosystem around it the standard such as the protocols for using a phone via Bluetooth as a passkey on a desktop/laptop to log in and other things like syncing the passkeys between devices using their existing password manager services for user convenience (so that the average person can actually use them). Under the hood it's still WebAuthn for the actual authentication. Hardware security keys that connect via USB, Bluetooth, or NFC have been around for a while but have usually operated in nonresident key mode where they've been used for second factor authentication. Nonresident key mode has the advantage of storing the private key in an encrypted format with the website or service your logging into, meaning that the actual hardware key doesn't need to have any storage capacity and can work with an infinite number of sites. This has the disadvantage that you have to provide a username (and typically a first factor like a password) to lookup which keys should be used (ie the ones associated with a specific account). That is probably how your friend logged in with a USB dongle. WebAuthn credentials that operate in resident key mode like passkeys do on the other hand store both the information related to identity and authentication, meaning that all you have to do is select the account you want to log into. This requires that they are stored on a trusted device like a phone, a laptop, or a hardware security key dongle that has storage.
What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
Again, the same thing that happens when you forget your physical keys for your car or home. You can't access the thing protected by them until you go get them. The alternative is to bypass the normal authentication workflow and work around it, such as with an account recovery process (similar to getting a locksmith to get back into your car or home).
I am all for more security and less password remembering, but I hop around a lot of computers.
Then you'd probably like being able to log in by just unlocking your phone and confirming things, rather than having to go through a password lookup and one time code entering process each time.
Cool, thanks for the info. This is something I have wanted to setup for a little while now, I just didn't understand all of the nuances.
account is passkey locked, but I need to check my email from my friend's laptop. Would that require that I install passkey on their laptop
Yes but you would not want to do that. I can’t imagine a scenario where you could make it to your friends house without your phone, and also need to check your email so bad that you borrow their laptop, but in that case you would not be able to log in. Unless your passkey for that service is stored in your password manager, in which case you’d have to log in to that first.
Does that also mean that if I forget to log out of passkey, they can access all of my accounts correlated with my passkey account?
There is no “Passkey account”, it’s not a service or an app. It’s a file stored either on your device or in your password manager.
what happens if my passkey account is compromised? All of my accounts are linked to a single point of failure?
I already brought up that you have no “passkey account” to compromise, but if your passkey was somehow stolen, the only thing compromised would be the service that passkey is for.
A friend of mine had to break out some kind of USB dongle to log into his Google account on a new machine the other day. Is that a form of passkey?
You can get hardware devices to store passkeys on, yes.
What happens if that dongle gets lost/stolen/broken? Or what if you just forgot it at home? Are you SOL?
If it’s lost or stolen you’d want to make new passkeys yes. If you forgot it at home, you wouldn’t be able to log in if the hardware device was the only thing you had a passkey stored on.
I wonder how often you truly forget important every day articles at home, despite you needing to get connected to things at a moments notice. I don’t think I’ve forgotten my phone anywhere once in the last 15 years.
The thing is, all these scenarios you’re coming up with are no different for passkeys than they are for complex, unique, secure passwords. It sounds like your usual MO is being able to recall your password (In the case you’ve forgotten your phone and are in a borrowed device), which means your passwords likely aren’t secure, and you’re probably reusing them, which is more of a “single point of failure” than passkeys ever could be.
Honestly, my advice to you is before you even start considering passwords vs passkeys, you need to fix yourself up man. You need to get your shit together a lil bit.
Exactly like an encryption key. Here's a video from Security Now with Steve Gibson (a well known security researcher) who explained it in a fairly approachable fashion. That link should start at the beginning of that segment, about 1:31:00 in.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Security Now with Steve Gibson
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Asymmetric cryptographic signing keypairs. An ECDSA variant is used to create and validate signatures. Your device creates a unique keypair per domain you register on. It only sends signatures, which doesn't reveal what the secret key is, and each signature is based on a single use challenge value.