this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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Privacy
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I'm quite confused about all the suspicion about passkeys. I just add a passkey to my password manager whenever the service offers it. I don't understand the "lock-in" concern because I can just import + export my passwords between managers
You can, maybe, have you actually imported or exported all of your passkeys before?
The concern is that in order to solve a technical problem, trusting the user, a system of actions and technologies called remote attestation was added to the passkey design. It allows for the service being authenticated into to figure out if it even wants to accept the supposed users attempt. One way remote attestation can be done is by client. Not using a client the service accepts? No way in even if you have the right credentials!
This is really powerful technology that lets me ensure my own services won’t even allow connection to insecure clients or just clients I don’t wanna talk to.
But of course we’re not talking about me using passkeys to gate access to my own services I control, we’re talking about Google, Microsoft and Apple doing it. So built into the passkey standard is the capacity for the service to simply stop allowing you to access it with a passkey if you don’t have the right thingy (or any other suite of remote attestation technologies, client is just one example).
Do you know if your passkeys do this? Do you know how to get in to your accounts if passkeys are suddenly not working?
People are mostly afraid of lock in, control, etc here but the real problem is that most users don’t understand how passkeys work. How can you comply with a regime of passkey use if you don’t know how they work?
Interesting. I was ignorant about that. For my use case (a faster alternative to totp but I still have that in case), it's pretty useful, but I can definitely see the concerns now.
There is no reason for you to be using a passkey if it's in your manager already
passkeys are more phishing resistant than passwords, even with password managers
Passkeys use public-private cryptography and password use shared secret. So regardless if the key is stored in a password manager, the passkey is still more secure. It would be impervious if stored in a security key. But it is still more secure than a password, even when handeled the same way.
Right up until you attempt to log in on an less trusted device. Password+TOTP fixes this.
Fixes what? By 'less trusted device', do you mean to say leaking your password? Adding more factors makes it less likely an attacker gets all your factors, yes. Totp is also a shared secret credential. You can combine it with a password or a passkey if you want. Just don't store them together, or you loose them both at the same time.