alt Hacker NewsThis is a fantastic explanation and analogy. Thank you!
I will poke at this a bit:
> As for getting locked out of your account, losing your passkey would be the same as losing a password. You would need to follow the site’s password reset flow, and if you can recover from a lost password, you can recover from a lost passkey.
Do you think this is one of those scenarios that sounds reasonable at first, but can get torn apart by unknowns, edge cases etc? To use an analogy from a recent HN thread that is stretched a bit, is this like saying "If you use a crypto hardware wallet, you're safe", then reading about compromised hardware wallets due to something outside the assumption set.
The threat models here are often very similar to existing Password Manager threat models. If an attacker gets access to your Password Manager they get access to every password you have stored there and can do what they like with that information. The same applies to your Passkey Manager, which in many cases (including for your own peace of mind) is/should be the same app/vault as your Password Manager for other types of passwords.
A lot of the same Password Manager requirements and best practices apply to Passkey Management such as using strong master passwords or biometric unlocks or device PINs. Using Password Managers that support device bound hardware security enclaves, etc.
But even more so than average Password Management, because Passkeys are public key infrastructure the benefits you get out of the box exceed those of ordinary passwords. One of the factors in most Passkey implementations here is that sites (defined by hostname) all get different public keys. (Users are suggested to use different passwords for every site, but are not required to. Passkeys do that technically and are generally enforced in that effort by browsers and Operating Systems.) Leaking those public keys is no longer an issue (they truly are public keys), and leaked public keys aren't generally useful to other sites and apps. (Passwords that leak and even sometimes salted and hashed passwords that leak are liabilities and can be useful for rainbow table attacks or social engineering attacks or password reuse attacks.)
There are certainly edge cases to Passkey Management but in general the threat models follow Password Management threats: does someone have physical access to your device? Do they have access to your biometrics or device PINs?
But also the blast radius is reduced compared to usual Password Management threats: a single leaked private key generally only impacts a single website/app. Being able to sign a Passkey challenge once doesn't mean unlimited access (a password can be used forever after finding it), because challenges have timestamps and random entropy and generally don't support replay at all.