alt Hacker NewsRandomly generated strong passwords for all practical purposes are just as good as passkeys and keep you as the user in control. If you really need to copy/paste between a laptop and mobile or give it to a friend/family member, you can.
What do passkeys offer users that rand strong password + password managers don't?
Replies
Bull. People need to stop repeating this.
They have to be transmitted. They (or their hash) have to be stored. And so so many get that wrong.
There is nothing to prevent you from entering your super secure unique password on the wrong site if you get phished.
Passkeys don’t get transmitted. They’re used for cryptographic signing.
Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.
You can’t store a passkey wrong on the server, it’s a unique public key. If your entire database is stolen, it’s useless. No one else can login with your credentials because they don’t have the private key.
Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.
Passwords are fundamentally broken. They cannot be fixed. Cryptography is the solution in passkeys are the implementation.
A decent degree of phishing protection. And passkeys are not vulnerable to an attack that can transiently read server memory.
AIUI: A password can be entered into a phishing site, a passkey can't.
As I understand it, in theory, there is no "secret" exchange over the network with passkeys, once they are initially set up (one side sends a challenge to decrypt, and the challenge is one-time use. The decryption all happens locally.) And so they aren't as vulnerable to phishing or other common ways to steal passwords (such as key loggers, which don't even involve the network.)
But in my opinion, the solutions that passkeys provide come with the costs that are being discussed here, and I haven't found the trade-off worthwhile.
--------- Oct 14 - 12:30pm... --------- There is a wall of text below your question and _none coherently, concisely answer your question: "What do passkeys offer users that rand strong password + password managers don't?"
Passwords always risk a transferrable oops: "Hi friend, this is the bank calling. We've got a big issue: what's your password so we can fix it?"
They are tied to the issuing domain and the system that carries the passkey will refuse to present it to any other domains. It’s more or less impossible to fall for phishing or a spoofed site. Your password manager may have similar functionality for automatic filling of forms but less sophisticated users can often be tricked into providing passwords via copy and paste.