A lot of incorrect assumptions in this article. If you don’t like the idea of a key exchange over passwords, I hope you use password auth when you SSH into things 😁

The word passwordless is nonsense. In most cases, most passkey implementations, you need a PIN to unlock your private key to authenticate. PIN = password, except it’s numbers only. Nonsense. Passkeys simply obfuscate the problem and move it somewhere else, most often into a PROPRIETARY key management tool. For example, Microsoft wants you to use THEIR authenticator app. Not just any app that adheres to the standard. Nope. This effectively means super-vendor-lock-in. Absolute nonsense.

You can argue that the term “password less” is nonsense, but there is literally nothing about the spec that prevents you from using passkeys as they were designed: with hardware keys that support the open FIDO2 authentication protocol. Yes, you still need a second factor to verify the authentication attempt (via a PIN), but unless you’re mailing that key to hackers, the private key generated by your SoloKey, NitroKey, or another open source hardware key, is more secure than any password ever will be.

Passkeys usually require a phone - this is a single point of failure, and one that gives the big companies extra control over you. Phone, number, SIM, and so forth. A beautiful bevy of data. The whole idea of actually having to use your phone as an identity vector is horrible.

Phones support storing passkeys. Phones also support storing passwords. In no way does this mean you must use them for this. You can either use hardware keys, or you can use your favorite open source password manager to store passkeys where you should already be storing your passwords anyway.

You need “biometrics” to supposedly prove you’re you to unlock your private key. Biometrics are a form of password, except you can’t replace it, and it also gives yet more of your personal data to the big companies. More nonsense.

This is literally a direct contradiction of what the author said in their first bullet point. Use a PIN if you don’t like using biometric auth.

The implementation of passkeys is fragmented, vendor-specific, and complicated. Only diehards who love technology can use this. The same kind of people who were “all in” when IoT/cloud crap came out, and now they see their smart homes slowly go offline as big vendors almost arbitrarily cut support for old gadgets and effectively kill products. Because cloud.

Most of this is actually a fair critique. The FIDO Alliance is still working on the spec, and I think they should require any implementation of passkeys to follow the spec to a tee without adding any kind of nonstandard bullshit to their authentication.

However, most advancements in tech begin with only appealing to enthusiasts and later become adopted by wider audiences. It doesn’t make them bad that they aren’t immediately popular with everyone.

Passkeys only solve one use case - phishing where the user inputs their password and MFA into a fake site.

I’m glad the author can at least recognize that there’s at least one thing that passkeys solve that passwords can’t. But it’s not the only thing. When you enter a password on a site, you’re hoping like hell that the service you’re using hashes it and hashes it properly. When you authenticate with passkeys, you’re sending the site a public key. This key will have way more entropy than any password will, so anyone trying to crack a hashed public key is in for a long, miserable time (obviously not impossible though). But even if they wasted their time doing that, it’s a public key. Who cares?

Any service you use passkeys with instead of passwords won’t put you in another leaked password database. The public key just needs to be invalidated and you can move on with your life.