Phishing is even easier. Instead of "open your password manager, copy your password and paste it here" it becomes "your passkey is out of date, click here to enroll a new passkey. As part of this process a reset link will be sent to your email and code to your phone. Do not share the code with anyone."

The less sophisticated users can use their passkeys then, and the rest of us who know what we’re doing and have been for 25 years can continue to not support vendor and platform lock-in and forced device attestation. The amount of marketing and push behind passkeys does not feel entirely genuine to me.

Same with password managers inside web browsers: they'll only present the filled-in password for the original domain, not a phishing domain.

>They have to be transmitted.

Everyone knows to hash passwords now and browsers basically enforce SSL. This is not a practical differentiator.

>Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.

They are still susceptible to malicious enrollment. If a user is convinced a fake site is real, to the point that they are opening their password manager to copy the password to it, you should assume they will do the equivalent with a passkey (re-enroll attacker's key or register attacker's passkey).

>If your entire database is stolen, it’s useless.

As are databases containing strong randomly generated password hashes. What is your threat model here, they somehow forgot to hash their passwords yet they are still hashing session tokens, storing customer data in completely separate databases, safely storing private keys, etc.? It requires quite the strawman scenario to apply.

You're arguing theory and not practice. In theory they're better of course. The problem is the implementation. And implementation is a mess because everyone is trying to lock you into their own little ecosystem.

> There is nothing to prevent you from entering your super secure u quiet password on the wrong site if you get phished.

You replied to someone talking about password managers, which objectively do exactly that.

> Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.

And Passkeys don't offer portability, user choice, or user control.

Cryptography may be a solution, passkeys are one technical implementation that at is core is designed around smartphone-first, vendor-first, brand-loyality-first thinking.

You lose a device or the local DB that keeps your passkey and you are screwed.

You need to migrate from one login domain to another (rebranding, change of login providers...) and none of your customer credentials will carry over.

Your password might not be stored anywhere except in your head.

Your local storage gets compromised and your passkeys are there for the taking (password in your head isn't).

"Cloud" password managers who hold your passkey private key part is exactly like them having your password and are worse than websites having proper cryptographic hash of your password: they might not be e2e encrypting it (you were comparing with sites doing password hashing wrong too), so a breach exposes all your passkeys just the same.

My point is that there is no panacea. Passkeys are like SSH keys for the web. I still put a passphrase on my SSH keys. Do you?

Passkeys can be, and have been, stolen and hijacked. They make it more difficult for scammers and hackers to get into your accounts, but not impossible. How many phishing emails have you personally fallen for that this is your #1 concern over the fragility and complexity of passkeys?

> They have to be transmitted.

What do you image happens with passkeys?

> They (or their hash) have to be stored.

What do you image happens with passkeys?

> 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.

From the consumer, do you imagine a hacker has my key to unlock my password database?

From a service provider, do you imagine they are not using encryption at rest?

> Cryptography is the solution in passkeys are the implementation.

Do you imagine cryptography is not used with passwords?

> Bull. People need to stop repeating this.

Wow, you sound like you know what you're talking about.

> They have to be transmitted. They (or their hash) have to be stored. And so so many get that wrong.

Ok, you've stopped sounding like you know what you're talking about.

Passwords have to be transmitted or stored. They don't have to be transmitted and stored. As you note, we usually opt for transmission but not storage. You could do it the other way around.

> There is nothing to prevent you from entering your super secure unique password on the wrong site if you get phished.

> Passkeys can’t be entered on the wrong site, the sites they work on is an inherent property of the key.

They can still be entered. Not working isn't the same thing as not being sent. A cryptographic exchange should hopefully fail before anyone who's pretending to be the counterparty you want learns enough to impersonate you. But you can enter anything anywhere.

> Unique strong passwords, TOTP, 2FA, one time sign in emails, none of those offer this stuff.

Unique strong passwords offer the following:

1(a). They are never transmitted (well, once), and provide phishing resistance; or

1(b). They are never stored, and provide leak resistance.

2. In the event of compromise, no other credentials of yours are simultaneously compromised.

It's true that it would be nice to enjoy phishing resistance and leak resistance.

Here are some other things unique strong passwords offer:

3. You are free to establish any relationship you like, with anyone you like. You don't need permission from Yubico to create an account somewhere.

4. Yubico can't pretend to be you.

You might notice that passkeys don't offer any of those. Your comment appears to enthusiastically endorse the idea that passkeys are a trap.

> Passwords are fundamentally broken. They cannot be fixed.

This is the "PGP is fundamentally broken" argument again. It will never be valid.

If you ask any followup questions, the reason that "PGP is fundamentally broken" is that people use Outlook plugins, and those plugins mean that they're constantly sending email in plaintext when they should have sent it encrypted. There's a very, very simple solution to this.

Don't use Outlook plugins. Run PGP yourself.

Before you send your email, check whether it looks more like "OK, everyone's ready for the kidnapping on Thursday" or "Eb+h+Q1iDEYUgJlO5GTtmcibC+D1E9oJWvZeoy9I2tpqxe9j/iokAx0R". You will be able to tell the difference. Nobody has ever failed at telling these apart.

If you were about to send the email, but it's still in plaintext, don't send it.

Passwords are no more fundamentally broken than PGP is.

Nothing of this explains anything, at best it increases the confusion. If anything, all this mumbo jumbo pushes me further away from using passkeys than before.

What are you talking about? Whenever I've written authentication, passwords are hashed on the client side and never transmitted in the clear.

The way passkeys are being pushed is so clearly an attempt to add friction to leaving walled gardens. Stop talking in absolutes in a world of greys.