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Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by Tibert@jlai.lu to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won't work on another device.

Now I don't know if that key can be stolen or not, or if it's really more secure or not, as people have really unsecure pins.

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[-] Asudox@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

        Since passkeys are basically asymmetric keys, SSH technically had "passkeys" for years.

[-] alvvayson@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

Yes, but that's missing the important part.

Passkeys is not primarily about asymmetric keys. It's about applying asymmetric keys to the Web as an open standard.

The W3C Web-Authn standard is what makes it important and revolutionary.

This is just as important as HTML, CSS and ActivityPub.

Finally we have an open standard that integrates in the web and offers a high level of security.

[-] jarfil@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Is that like TLS client-side certificates?

[-] alvvayson@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

It's actually quite similar, yes, in the sense that it uses a public/private key pair linked to your account.

But this works on the application layer and you don't use certificates.

Much easier to setup.

[-] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 9 months ago

Also it generates unique keys per site so it doesn't help anybody track you

[-] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 9 months ago

Just an example of protocol different than HTTP.

this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023

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