That might change on the country. At least here in Brazil, all logins require some sorth of MFA.

This changes by banks, some send code to our phone number (thought WhatsApp or SMS), others send SMS+email + face ID. All of them require at least the face ID. Some biggest banks requires you to go to ATM to authorize app access. You insert your card, password and authorize there.

There's Mercado Pago, which supports passkeys and standard MFA too. So you can store on bitwarden even.

Just the other day I was creating an ID on a government web site, which offered a list of security questions such as "Title of your favorite movie" or "Someone that you admired as a child" and the answer was not allowed to have any spaces.

Just absurd.

You can also just put any answer into the question as long as you will remember it.

Yet they still work and people generally don't have their accounts stolen. Why? Because security is more than technology. Stealing a bank account is illegal and you will be prosecuted for it.

No doubt preaching to the Choir here but I just generate a new pass phrase and store it in Bitwarden. If course for the non HN audience, much more confusing and dangerous.

> they're precisely the same difficulties people have moving from the paradigm of "memorizing or writing down all my passwords" to "using a password manager."

Errr, no.

You can transfer a password from one manager to another. Those very same password managers won't let you transfer a passkey they hold.

And if you know the password, you can use it anywhere by just typing it in - no complex technology or protocols involved. But using a passkey involves your secure computer talking to another computer, using a complex protocol that can't go via eyeballs and fingers. If you don't have a way to connect the device holding the passkey to the computer wanting your id - say your USB A Yubikey isn't recognised by your phone, then you are out of luck - you can't use that passkey, even though it's sitting in your hand.

And you can't work around that by copying the passkey to a device that can communicate with the service you're using, because you aren't allowed to copy.

It's an unworkable mess. The mess is not created by passkeys themselves, because, as others have said elsewhere the protocol is pure elegance. The mess is created by vendors choosing lock in over transportability. I'm hoping it's a passing phase.

> So you're saying that if you're inside Apple's walled garden, it works really well! Hmm...

Or google. If you use android and chrome then it all just works.

But god help you if you want to use a password manager to keep everything in sync; I haven't yet found a way for a mobile app or web page to explicitly signal to the device that the passkey to be created should live in $password_manager and not whatever built-in/on-device key-store exists.

So I only really use pass keys for desktop/web things because that's the only place the "store/read from $password_manager" flow _works_.

No one is convincing you need to use it. If it makes it makes other people's lives easy then ok

> In the worst case, banks actually don't make it very hard for seniors to reset your password/passkey; just show up at a branch with photo ID, your bank card, and your PIN, and a teller will help you reset your credentials. They do it all the time.

Maybe... I just ran into an annoying scenario where the largest bank in Canada made an administrative error where they mislinked an account belonging to me to my wife's profile.

I went to a physical branch to get it fixed and was told that branches don't have that kind of ability so I'd have to call customer support.

I called customer support and failed the verification questions because the expected answers were wrong, based on their own clerical error. After failing the verification questions, I just got a "we have to end this call, no additional information can be provided, please visit a branch."

I was able to get around it by calling back in and providing the incorrect, but expected answers to pass the verification step - I imagine, however, that this could have turned into a real nightmare for seniors, or anyone who wasn't able to deduce what the expected verification answers were.

Uh, if you set up a passkey it becomes the default almost always. Then on another device it'll pop up looking for it and look like login failure and you need to "try another way". That's alarming to anyone, not to mention seniors.

> just show up at a branch

In the UK at least, there are very few brick & mortar branches anymore - banks expect everything to be done online.