this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Can somebody help me understand the advantages of passkeys over a password manager? Googling just brings up tons of advertising and obvious self promotion, or ELI5s that totally ignore best passwords practices using managers.
Passkeys work like a public/private key pair you’d use to secure SSH access to a server. You give the website a public key that corresponds to a private key generated on your local device. Unlike a password it’s not feasible to brute force and there’s nothing you have to remember which makes it more convenient for you to use. If a site is hacked and they gain access to the public passkey you use to authenticate, it can’t be used to authenticate anywhere.
It’s not really an alternative to a password manager, because you can use a password manager to generate and sync a single passkey between all your devices. In fact 1Password is a big proponent of passkeys and even maintain a big directory of sites that use passkeys.
Unlike my devices, I always have my brain on me. Devices are much more easily lost or stolen than memories. I often might want to access sites using my account from third party devices which I don't want to be able to use my accounts when I'm not using them.
I just can't understand how using passkeys (or password managers, for that matter, massive single points of failure that they are) is supposed to be in any way shape or form more convenient than simply remembering a passphrase (which can easily be customisable for each site using some simple formula so that no two sites will share the same but it'll still be trivial to remember).
Both password managers and passkeys seem like colossal inconveniences and security risks to me when compared to passphrases, frankly. And if you want extra security there's always two factor authentication (with multiple alternatives in case you don't have access to one of them, of course; otherwise you might as well delete your account).
The benefit of passkeys over passwords is that they're phishing resistant and use strong encryption. They're effectively an iteration on yubikeys meaning you can have as many (or as few) passkeys associated with a given login as you'd like. So, you can easily prevent there being a single point of failure in the system.
Passkeys are tied to accounts and devices and those devices are the only devices used for authentication. This means you can access your account form a public device without that device ever knowing your credentials provided you and your secure device are physically present so it avoids the whole keylogger issue.
My secure device is in my other pants, though. I misplace my brain much less often.