TOTP is phishable. The push to get away from TOTP is driven by phishing.

I've done authentication projects for financial institutions that were actively targeted by phishing attacks, and it is difficult to mitigate TOTP phishing. Defeating TOTP is very much in the standard playbook for high-dollar scam operations.

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AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-]

The objection here isn't to something that uses public keys instead of TOTP. It's that they added support for remote attestation to passkeys, which an enormous red flag and enables That Which Is To Be Prevented, i.e. permanently entrenching the incumbents because many third parties won't support new device makers with no user adoption yet and users won't adopt a device that won't work with many third party services.

Moreover, the large majority of ordinary people are going to use whatever comes with their phone anyway, which can then lock the key in the device's secure processor by default independent of remote attestation. So then it's not getting you anything for those people and the primary thing it does is to impede Linux Girl from using Linux and anyone new from ever trying to create a competing mobile platform or even a usable non-Google fork of Android.

The obvious way to satisfy people is to remove support for remote attestation from the spec.

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aleksejs 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> The obvious way to satisfy people is to remove support for remote attestation from the spec.

If you presume bad faith on the part of basically the entire WebAuthn implementer community, how does this help?

The consumer passkey authenticator implementations of today do not provide attestations, passkey relying parties do not consume them, and both would need to intentionally ship changes to enact the scenario you're worried about. If you're worried about both of these colluding to lock you out of your accounts, it seems naive to think that changes to an (intentionally malleable, extensible) spec will protect you.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All the rest of this argument just misses me. Whatever the non-phishable authentication you want to use is, that's fine by me. But TOTP is phishable, eminently so, so you're not going to see security people back down from deprecating it.

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AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-]

Then they need to advance an alternative that doesn't support remote attestation.

	▲	tptacek 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think the arguments about attestation are bogus for all the reasons everyone else is pointing out but that doesn't matter because I'm not talking about Passkeys, I'm talking about why TOTP is a dead letter. You're not going to get security people to back down on deprecating TOTP, because it's phishable, and the point of modern authentication protocols is defeat that attack. By all means, keep lobbying against Passkeys! I don't care. But you'd be shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically to build TOTP into your case, as the comment I replied to originally just did.