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Lattytoday at 1:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

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`.


Replies

ealready_valuetoday at 1:30 PM

"Oh, usually my bank just logs me in, that's strange. Let me just go grab my username and password and type it into this site that looks like my bank."

Same thing is going to happen with passkeys for non-technical users for exactly the same reason you stated. People will think the integration is busted and manually copy/paste the non-passkey credentials in. In that way, I would argue that passkey is not stronger protection against phishing attacks unless its the only way to login. It is, at best, a convenience for users.

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flerchintoday at 1:17 PM

How did fake-something get injected as a subdomain?

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lapcattoday at 1:20 PM

> 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`.

Why would you trust the very same password managers that don't handle passwords properly to handle passkeys properly?

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embedding-shapetoday at 1:27 PM

> 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 seen people do this AFK as well, and I'm always helpfully suggesting them the correct way of solving this: verifying the URL again, and if correct, add it to the password manager so it remembers in the future, and never copy-paste passwords on the web. Basically 50/50 if they take the advice or come back after a week asking if it's safe to copy-paste the password into the website, and I try to inform again.

Shockingly, I saw one developer peer copy-pasting a password into a website, but I guess for these people there is no hope.

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