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UltraSanetoday at 2:41 PM2 repliesview on HN

The biggest issue with passkeys is that since most USB tokens that support them don't allow syncing the private key to a backup device you have to enroll ALL of them to every site that supports passkeys. This is annoying but it makes storing backups in secure offsite locations impractical.


Replies

iamnotheretoday at 3:00 PM

This is a fair criticism and needs work, I have some short thoughts on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755217

EvanAndersontoday at 3:25 PM

It's beyond annoying. It's creating needless toil that no "normies" will ever actually do.

I'd love a hardware sold in multi-packs and "born" at the factory with identical internal device key encryption keys (DKEK). I'd love, even more, if a token just allowed you to "commission" new ones w/ a user-specified DKEK on first use.

I'd use one token as a daily driver and store the other(s) in safe location(s), empty of my personal key material. (Or, if I can just commission a new token w/ my DKEK, store a printed copy of my DKEK in a safe location.)

Give the token a mechanism to "type" a backup of its internal state, encrypted with the DKEK, as a USB HID keyboard. That gives me an easy way to backup the token each time I enroll a new website.

If I lose my daily-driver token I just pull a spare from storage, import my last backup, and I'm up and running.

That would kick ass. No "You just need to buy two tokens and enroll them in every website" bullshit.

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