Can someone tell me why I should care about this rather than just continuing to use my password and 2FA?
I’m stealing this from another comment:
The main advantage comes with phishing resistance. Standard MFA (time based codes) is not phishing resistant. Users can be social engineered into giving up a password and MFA token. Other MFA types, such as pop up notifications, are susceptible to MFA fatigue. Similar to YubiKeys, Passkeys implement a phishing resistant MFA by storing an encryption key, along with requiring a biometric. The benefit here is that these are far easier for the average user, and the user does not need to carry a physical device. Sure, fingerprints could possibly be grabbed with physical presence, but there is far less risk that a users fingerprint is stolen, than a user being social engineered over the phone into giving creds. For most organizations and users, this is far more secure.
Standard MFA (time based codes) is not phishing resistant. Users can be social engineered into giving up a password and MFA token.
So basically this is just idiot-proofing the system. If you aren’t the type of person to give your password or MFA token to another person, then passkeys don’t really make better security.
idiot-proofing
Don’t chalk it up to idiots. The quote mentions “MFA fatigue”, which is something that definitely happens.
If you’re a Windows user (and moreso if you play games on your computer), you certainly regularly have admin prompts. I’m pretty sure that, like everyone else, you just click OK without a second thought. That’s fatigue. Those prompts exist for a security reason, yet there are so many of them that they don’t register anymore and have lost all their meaning.
For my job, I often have to login into MS Azure, and there are days where I have to enter my MFA 3 or 4 times in a row. I expect it, so I don’t really look at the prompt anymore. I just enter the token to be done with it asap; that’s a security risk
And, they are actually more convenient because then entire login process is one step with minimal keyboard input, rather than two.
What’s the backup login mechanism when you lose your biometric sensor? How do you pair with the new sensor?
I kind of don’t like to store my fingerprints with Google. Even FBI collects them when you are indicted.
What about allowing us to log in to services via asymmetric keys?
Note that you pretty much can’t store them with Google or Apple; smartphone biometric sensors operate the on-device HSM, not something remote.
It has its own pros. The biggest one is that it uses asymmetric cryptography. This means that the only one that can sign a challenge given by the server is the one that has the private key equivalent of the public key the challenge was used to be encrypted with. The challenge is sent to the client, in which the client signs the challenge the server sent with their private key and then sent back to the server. Since the server has the public key, the server can verify whether the signature is indeed from the private key owner. This is possible because the private and public key are mathematically linked. This is the reason why it is phish proof. Though I am not sure whether a phisher can just take the challenge, let the victim sign it and then give back the challenge to the server to login. Can anyone confirm that? They are not better than hardware keys (since they are basically software versions of physical hardware keys), but at least better than passwords. At least the breaches will impose much lesser risks when it becomes a standard.
They are not better than hardware keys (since they are basically software versions of physical hardware keys), but at least better than passwords.
That is not technically correct. Passkey is a protocol first and foremost, and the way it is implemented is up to the vendor. Can be software, eg. Apple, Google, Bitwarden, etc, but you can as well use a hardware key, eg. Yubikey has Passkey support for quite a while now.
