It’s essentially just public key cryptography streamlined to reduce friction for the user. When you’re prompted to create a passkey for a service a new public/private keypair is created. The private key can then be synced to other devices for example via the iCloud keychain or Bitwarden. Obviously you have to then trust that provider to keep your keys safe. The upside is that your passkey can be automatically discovered and used to sign in without using a password. Alternatively the private key can be device bound but the downside is that if you lose the device you lose the private key too.
If it was just to helpfully reduce friction, it wouldn’t be so controversial. The inclusion of any sort of TPM and hardware attestation support at all is what has some people sounding the alarm (in my opinion rightfully).
My post was only meant to be a quick explanation of what passkeys are so I’ll leave it as is. I do think it’s healthy to be suspicious of big tech corporations and their motivations though so I’ll be doing some further reading.
so whats a passkey and how is it different from a password?
It’s essentially just public key cryptography streamlined to reduce friction for the user. When you’re prompted to create a passkey for a service a new public/private keypair is created. The private key can then be synced to other devices for example via the iCloud keychain or Bitwarden. Obviously you have to then trust that provider to keep your keys safe. The upside is that your passkey can be automatically discovered and used to sign in without using a password. Alternatively the private key can be device bound but the downside is that if you lose the device you lose the private key too.
If it was just to helpfully reduce friction, it wouldn’t be so controversial. The inclusion of any sort of TPM and hardware attestation support at all is what has some people sounding the alarm (in my opinion rightfully).
My post was only meant to be a quick explanation of what passkeys are so I’ll leave it as is. I do think it’s healthy to be suspicious of big tech corporations and their motivations though so I’ll be doing some further reading.