Looks like a huge amount of security vendors are working to have a secure and open standard for passkey portability between platforms.
It is always good to see major collaboration in the security space like this considering the harsh opinions that users of some of these vendors have toward many of the others. I just wish apps and sites would stop making me login with username and password if passkeys are meant to replace that lol.
I don’t like that passkeys are portable, this kind of defeats the entire purpose. The way they were sold to me is the following: it’s 2 factors in one. The first is the actual device where the key lives, and the second, the user verification, like a pin, face scan, fingerprint etc. If it’s synced across the cloud, there’s no longer the first factor being the unique key on the unique device.
Granted, passkeys even without the first factor are still magnitudes better in terms of convenience and security compared to passwords, but it just disappoints me a little that there are no good options to save passkeys on my local device only, with no cloud sync.
If anyone knows of a local-only passkey manager app for android, as well as the same as a firefox extension, I’d love to know about it!
If they’re not portable how would I for example login to an account while on my Desktop, if I set up the passkey on my Phone?
You generate a second one on the other device.
Assuming that all services you log into support multiple passkeys. My auto financing company doesn’t, for example
Well, then it seems like they have not understand the idea behind passkeys, like so many…
I’d like to see some documentation that says passkeys were intended to never be synced across anything.
Everything I have ever read is that it’s basically asymmetric cryptography like ssh keys. You have a private one, generate the public and give it to the site. It stops reuse of passwords and site breaches become useless as the public key is useless for attacking an account on another site, etc. (well, besides whatever data was lost in the breach which is outside the scope.)
I see no reason to limit someone having the private key on their phone, their desktop, etc. Having to generate yet another passkey for every device is inefficient and would decrease adoption of this.