alt Hacker NewsPasskeys do marginally improve security against MITM and phishing attacks, but they are primarily for protecting the lowest common denominator from themselves: people who re-use passwords and/or don't use a password manager.
If you use multiple devices throughout the day, registering passkeys in all of these systems becomes a big headache with O(m*n) complexity, so putting the passkeys in a password manager is the only realistic solution. But this still breaks the login flow for a very common use case: how do I log in on a device that I don't own? With a password in a password manager I at least have the option of manually typing the password.
The biggest problem, though, is how users are pushed into it without any warning or knowledge of what they're signing up for. I've accidentally set up passkeys just by clicking an okay button a few times in the past and had to go back and figure out how to undo it after being blocked from login on another computer (which computer was I on again?).
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> how do I log in on a device that I don't own?
Sad reality is that such usecase is less and less common, thus, no one cares about it. I think majority of my friends would not be able to access their email, or facebook or alike, if they were forced to use my computer in emergency.
I'm just storing my passkeys in 1password, which means they're synced across my two computers and phone and also means I gave up any kind of hardware security.
Oh well.
My MIL setup a passkey accidentally on her Google account and now has no idea where it is. Removing it now requires her password which she’s also forgotten. But now for some reason on Google I can’t initiate any type of forgot your password flow because of how Google sets up things and I have zero clue where she stored the passkey.
The offer a strong protection against phishing attacks that would still get plenty of password manager users: fake websites. A passkey is strongly linked to a domain, so a fake site can't get that credential.
Some password managers will only fill if a domain matches, but IRL the response I've seen from most users when it doesn't match is to assume the integration broke and manually copy/paste it in. I've also seen lots of them do stuff like happily autofill on any prefix of the domain, so your credential for `something.example.com` will autofill into `fake-something.example.com`.
iCloud Keychain? Is there a reason not to use it? Aside from having android.
> how do I log in on a device that I don't own?
This is solved by passkey-implementing software and devices (with Bluetooth) allowing you to log in with a QR code (Webauthn via CTAP hybrid transport). iOS and Android support this, and it’s generally not a locked-down thing if other devices wanted to do it too.
The only use case left is in “how do I login if all my devices are stolen/fall into a body of water” in which there really isn’t an answer beyond “get (a|your) device back, sign back into your password manager, use that to get back into critical accounts”.