A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactly a passkey is. There’s a good reason for that. A passkey is in some sense one of two (or three) different things, depending on how it’s stored.
They are FIDO2. This is the passwordless stuff yubico has been talking about and working on for ages, plus a marketing name.
https://www.yubico.com/blog/a-yubico-faq-about-passkeys/
Wow! I had no idea. I assumed the yubikey bioseries didn’t work with passkeys. But I read the documentation that you linked, and I just tested it out on the demo site. It works.
That’s amazing! Thanks
Can only store 25 keys but hey that’s still something.
I like that you are able to query what keys are stored, so if you are ever replacing or upgrading the key you can see where you should update to the new one. That is tough on the current yubikey, I’ve got a few generations of them and have to hold onto them just in case I happened to use them for 2FA somewhere and don’t remember it. 2FA is dynamically generated so there’s not really a way to change that, it’s just inconvenient.
I prefer the yubikey webauthn fido2 non passkey approach. It’s not limited to 25 slots. And if your key gets compromised, or you’re forced to unlock it, there isn’t a list of sites that it works on.
With passkeys, if somebody compromises you, physically, they can see everything you can log into. That makes me feel icky
Can they though? I own a few yubikeys with passkeys stored inside and i cannot query stored logins without entering a pin.
Right, so they coerce you to unlock the yubi key (threats, torture, finger removal, etc) and now they see all your passkeys and what they belong to. It’s a menu of your activity.
There are definitely pluses and minuses. It will lock you out after 8 incorrect pins so if it came down to it, you could probably force it to lock pretty quickly.