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JasonADrury 3 hours ago

This isn't a footgun, you just have absurd security requirements.

>It should be pretty obvious that using a passkey, which lives in the same password manager as your main sign-in password/passkey is not two factors. Setting it up like this would be pointless.

You simply do not need two factors with passkeys. Using passkeys is not pointless, they are vastly more secure than most combined password+2fa solutions.

There are extremely few contexts where an yubikey would be meaningfully safer than the secure element in your macbook.

YmiYugy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How is it not 2FA? It's MacBook + Fingerprint.

JasonADrury an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not 2fa if you assume some catastrophic exploit chain that allows an attacker to dump your macbooks secure element.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption for most people, and you're screwed in that situation even if you use yubikeys.

gregoriol 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

2FA is more secure than 1FA even if that one has a high security level

nixpulvis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To be clear. Proper 2FA, via something like a smartcard or any truly external device is still much more secure. You could have one of those factors be a passkey, that's fine, and may be a good idea.

But there are UX issues with passkeys as well, that aren't all well addressed. My biggest gripe is that there is often no way to migrate from one passkey provider to another, though apparently there may be a standard for this in the works?

Genbox 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you saying that two weak factors are more secure than one strong factor?

lazide 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not who you are replying too. But a yubikey is not a weak factor.

In fact, it’s not even meaningfully more secure than passkey (as passkey is designed) - passkey is, however, more convenient.

So it’s more ‘one weak factor + (really times) one medium/strong factor’ vs ‘one medium/strong factor’.

Which yes, the first one is better in every way from a security perspective. At least in isolation.

The tricky part is that passkeys for most users are way more convenient, meaning they’ll actually get used more, which means if adopted they’ll likely result in more actual security on average.

Yubikeys work well if you’re paying attention, have a security mindset, don’t lose them, etc. which good luck for your average user.

PunchyHamster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

if 2fa is "use the second factor that's on same device as first factor" (like when using phone apps in many cases, password + 2fa from email/sms/authenticator app on same device), I disagree.

JasonADrury 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nonsense, depends entirely on the value of the authentication factor.